Sainsbury’s to offer suppliers loyalty data

Sainsbury’s is launching a service to offer its suppliers greater insight into customer requirements – in particular the most appropriate way to promote products to shoppers.

The supermarket is teaming up with Lawson Software and Taylor Nelson Sofres (TNS) to carry out in-depth analysis of its loyalty-card data in order to find out what customers want from products and supermarket services.

Suppliers will be able to see repeat-purchase rates for individual products and the profiles of customers purchasing particular products, as well as investigating the most suitable promotional tools to attract customers.

Sainsbury’s customer marketing director Andrew Ground says: “By providing suppliers with this information, we will be helping them to develop products which put customers even closer to the heart of our business and those of our suppliers.”

According to AC Nielsen, 90,000 products are launched in the UK each year and 90 per cent fail.

Ground adds: “By working with TNS and Lawson we are able to give more valuable information than we could simply using loyalty card data.”

The move follows a trial of the system earlier in the year with key suppliers, but all will now be able to take advantage of the initiative – for a fee.

Tesco has been providing its suppliers with access to anonymous loyalty-card information about consumers’ buying habits through dunnhumby retail – a subsidiary of data consultancy dunnhumby – since 2001. The supermarket took a 53 per cent stake in dunnhumby in the same year.