The Supermarket and Loyalty Cards

The EFTPOS sytem allows a supermarket to analyse sales by storing details of what is sold. This allows analysis of how items are sold in groups the time of day sales of certain types of item are sold. It also allows analysis of regional trends in sales obvious trends like mushy-pea and black-pudding sales being higher in the north of England than in the south for eample. Seasonal trends - "are ice cream sales higher in summer?" - can also be analysed.

There can also be analysis trying to guess what the customer actually came in to buy. Together with more complicated questions like does product positioning and store layout effect sales? However the supermarkets realised that information was missing they did not have information on individual customers. So they developed the concept of the loyalty card. The concept was not new, Dividend was used by Co-ops in the 1800s! and green shield stamps were prominent in the 1960s. However the use of ICT made the card a powerful tool customers could be grouped. Do males buy different things to females? Does the presnce of children in the family effect purchases and so on. They sold the idea to customers by saying they wanted to encourage poeple to return to the store by giving cheeper petrol (or what ever other incentive they choose to offer) to regular customers.

This process is called data warehousing. Separate notes are provided in module 1.

© LEV