According to Retail Week, Pets at Home has reported like-for-like growth of 4.1% in its first quarter after building on momentum created by its VIP Club loyalty programme. Total revenues grew by 10.4% during the 16 weeks to July 17 to £210.8m with growth driven by new store openings and improving revenues across its food, accessories and services offers. Nick Wood, chief executive officer, said: “Our differentiated offering in the pet retail market, an increasingly seamless approach to omni-channel, and growing customer participation and engagement in our VIP loyalty programme continues to drive strong returns.” Membership of its VIP Club loyalty programme grew by 400,000 for the 16 weeks to July 17 to take membership to 2.4m members. The card is now used during transactions involving 57% of store revenues, up from 52% during the final quarter of its last financial year. SG-retail were part of the team that helped to design the loyalty programme.  Services rev...

Guest article from E-consultancy :  Tesco is the clear winner in the online grocery market taking 50p of every grocery pound spent shopping on the internet.  This high share is set to continue not just because of spending on fulfilment, dark stores, distribution, stock and offline marketing but due to its online visibility through organic search and a very visible well-structured website.  The online grocery sector is worth £5.6bn   (compared with the whole of the grocery market being worth £157bn).  .   Online grocery shopping set to rise The Guardian  recently reported that as much as 15% of UK grocery sales , worth £900m, were online in the four days from 20-23 December, which shows there is a definite appetite for growth. Together with strong festive purchases, online grocery sales grew 19% last year and are predicted to more than double over the next five years to £13bn (see table below). The big shop is more common online...

Here's an interesting post from IBM on the Internet of Things.... We live in a connected world, a world with  up to a trillion connected devices  in the coming decade. Thanks to IPv6, which enables us to  address every grain of sand in the world , this is likely to increase even more. These connected devices will change our world drastically, and they will generate massive amounts of data. It is projected that  by 2020, sensor data will create approximately 16-20 zettabytes of data annually . That data can drive a lot of value. In fact,  according to Cisco , it is going to be a $19 trillion market within the coming years. The Internet of Things is rapidly taking shape, and we better be ready for the consequences. There are many applications within the Internet of Things. What do you think of a smart city, where even garbage generates data? The South Korean city  Songdo  has been built from the ground up and is completely connected. Songdo, lo...

The attached article is courtesy of McKinsey and resonates very strongly with us.  Mobilizing your C-suite for big-data analytics Leadership-capacity constraints are undermining many companies’ efforts. New management structures, roles, and divisions of labor can all be part of the solution. November 2013   | by Brad Brown, David Court, and Paul Willmott Over the past 30 years,   most companies have added new C-level roles in response to changing business environments. The chief financial officer (CFO) role, which didn’t exist at a majority of companies in the mid-1980s, rose to prominence as pressures for value management and more transparent investor relations gained traction. 1   Adding a chief marketing officer (CMO) became crucial as new channels and media raised the complexity of brand building and customer engagement. Chief strategy officers (CSOs) joined top teams to help companies address increasingly complex and fast-changing global markets. Today,...

How TfL uses big data to personalise its marketing campaigns Transport for London has the gargantuan task of carrying more than 1bn passengers each year, which means that the marketing team has an equally difficult job of keeping them all informed about upgrades and delays. To find out more about TfL's marketing strategy and exactly what it does with all that Oyster Card data, e-consultancy (www.econsultancy.com) recently spoke to Head of Marketing Services Julie Dixon. What are the main marketing aims for TfL, as presumably it’s not about brand awareness? The role of TfL is to keep London working, growing and to make life in London better – which is a pretty big task! Put more simply we want to get people from A to B as quickly, safely and efficiently as possible, providing them the information they need to make their journey in the way they want to get it. Virtually every resident, worker or visitor to London is one of our customers. This includes people using the pu...

dunnhumby USA are suing emnos USA for patent infringement of their "Shop" analytical tool. dunnhumby have filed a lawsuit (  Civil Action No.   1:13-cv-00399 ;)  in the   U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois   although the case is yet to be heard.   There's a lot of interest in the outcome not least as it pits two of the world's leading retailers (Tesco and Kroger - co-owners of dunnhumby USA) against American Express (owners of emnos). dunnhumby's "Shop" enables subscribers to analyze a retailer's customer data - ie their epos sales data linked to a unique customer ID - via a web based portal. The patent was granted in 2004 following the launch of The Shop to Kroger and their suppliers around the same time. "The Shop" was developed by dunnhumby UK ltd in 2001 as a way of automating the delivery of analysis to Tesco's suppliers following the launch of dunnhumby Retail in the same year. dunnhumby Retail w...