Two years ago, the corporate structure of Sainsbury’s, a grocery chain based in the United Kingdom, was divided among three groups: One that ran the stores, another that coordinated products and offerings and a third that designed marketing efforts. What little customer analysis Sainsbury’s undertook was done on an enterprisewide basis, meaning that local preferences often were overlooked.
As a result, when Tesco, a rival U.K. chain, came out with a successful loyalty program, Sainsbury’s saw its fortunes diminish considerably.
This changed with Sainsbury’s Nectar, a points-based program that fed customer demographic and shopping cart data into a corporatewide database. This allowed the company to shift from a product-centric marketing strategy to one that reflected its customers
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