Whether you are a major retailer like Asda with millions shopping every week or a small local store with just hundreds of customers, knowing more about your customers enables you to develop a more compelling offer. Tesco invested millions in developing their highly successful loyalty card, the Tesco Clubcard which gives them terrific data at an individual level. However, most companies cannot afford to set up a similar data-rich loyalty card.

This week, when I popped into Asda, the checkout operator said thay were doing a survey and asked me for my postcode which she entered on her terminal. Many of you will know that I used to be Head of Media & Advertising at Asda and we pioneered this research approach when I was there. The technology then was slightly older and the checkout operator had to write the postcode on the back of the store copy of the till receipt. Someone then had the pleasure of transferring the data on to a spreadsheet which we subsequently analysed. This process is now automated.

This one piece of additional data (postcode) was hugely valuable. It enabled us to identify:

  • the number of weekly shoppers per store and how it varied by day
  • the share of spend by postcode sector
  • individual store catchment areas subsequently used to optimise the individual store offer and advertising and media planning
  • the characteristics of high value shoppers and how they differ from low value shoppers
  • target locations for new stores
  • and much more…

This principle is something that could be easily replicated by a small store. Just ask shoppers for their postcode and set up a spreadsheet to log the results.

In addition to the the benefits above it’s possible to enrich the data by merging the postcode data with lifestyle data such as Mosaic to identify people’s behaviour and usage of other products and services.

If you need help then contact a data marketing expert