Sainsburys announced this week that they have acquired Nectar and sister company i2C for £60m.  For the sellers Aimia it marks an in glorious retreat from the UK that spelled disaster for their shareholders, having paid £380m for Nectar in 2008, 10 years later they have sold it for a fraction of their outlay, concluding that they have taken the programme as far as they can. For the purchasers the prospects are much more encouraging and so the question is begged ,what should Sainsburys do now that they are in full control ? Here are my thoughts   : 1. Firstly they should continue with what’s working. Around 15m people regularly swipe their Nectar card, the vast majority of them in Sainsburys but also including BP, ebay, Europcar and various other online merchants. There’s nothing immediately broken at the front end, although, as we will see later there are many ways they can make it better for customers and more profitable for Sainsburys. 2. They sho

At any point in time, most clothing retailers do not accurately know, across all of their stores and channels, how many of the products they have ordered, are currently available for customers to buy. This creates disappointed customers who cannot buy what they want and is highly frustrating for staff, store owners and their suppliers. It results in poor service, missed sales and significantly higher costs. This is a multi-billion dollar industry problem but one that we can now help clothing retailers to solve.  We can deploy RFID technology and AI to enable retailers to capture and deploy real time stock availability data so they can increase sales, reduce waste and deliver much better customer engagement   The core of the proposition is a multi-channel Real Time Product Availability Engine which uses RFID technology and AI to process product, order and fulfillment, replenishment and returns data and translate them into actionable insights that can be deployed

The UK loyalty programme market is thriving as most retailers, other than those pursuing a discount led strategy, offer some kind of loyalty programme to supplement their core proposition and to help them to understand their customers. In recent months we have seen the launch of new programmes from Waitrose, Morrisons, Pets at Home and M&S whilst mainstream programmes such as Tesco Clubcard, Boots & Nectar are used every week by tens of millions of consumers. These programmes are more or less the same today as they were when Tesco first launched Clubcard over twenty years ago - typically points based, requiring customers to remember to carry a plastic card and swipe it at the till and to carry paper based vouchers which they receive through the post or printed at till. There has been very little take up so far of digital enabling technologies from companies like Mobilize and Eagle Eye which offer significant cost savings to retailers and much greater convenience for customers.

Has the botched sale of dunnhumby cost Tesco shareholders $1 billion ? Normally if you choose not to sell an income producing asset at least you get the consolation of keeping the income stream. A potential cash windfall is offset by continued and hopefully growing earnings. But that won't be the case for Tesco who, according to observer estimates,  have given away income of about £50m per year to their former JV partner Kroger. They did this because Kroger had a change of ownership clause which was triggerable if dunnhumby came under new ownership. By negotiating an exit from the Jv and keeping all of the necessary people and technology they require, Kroger are able to continue to benefit from the services that dunnhumby were providing them but without having to pay fees to the UK organisation. As a quid pro quo,Kroger enabled dunnhumby to continue with a small US operation, search for another USA grocery partner and to be sold to a 3rd party. The agreement has cost T

The Power of Personalisation Most retailers would say that if they could deliver a more personalised service sales would grow. Unfortunately this is easier to say than to do. There are three key reasons for this :   Most retailers, other than at an aggregated level, don’t know who their customers are, their relative importance, the degree to which they are committed to the retailer’s products or services and the extent to which they are favourably or unfavourably disposed towards the brand Even if retailers do know this, changing something in order to improve things, is difficult because employees tend to be organised around stores, channels or products and services rather than customers Even if the retailer has the necessary insight and organisation skills, it typically lacks the required technology or fails to implement it optimally These three constraints can be overcome as follows : 1. Building the necessary customer insight. This requires harvesting

According to the Tribune-Review GNC, the USA retailer of vitamins and healthcare products, is growing LFL sales following their partnership with dunnhumby.  GNC has been sending individualized mailings to 1 million of its 7 million Gold Card members a month since September. The company's eight-page mySource catalogs are customized to each member, based on previous buying habits and any demographic data they've collected on the person, including age and gender. “My standard is that it drove incremental profitability, not just sales, but profitable sales,” CEO Michael Archbold said in a presentation to analysts last month with dunnhumby's Pete Miles-Prouten. “Because the goal here is profitable growth.” “It was like a snowflake. No one got the same communication,” said Peter Miles-Prouten, senior vice president of consumer markets at dunnhumby. The company declined to provide specific sales and profit numbers related to the campaign. But in February, GNC reported fou