In her keynote talk on the final day of MADFest last week, Tesco’s chief customer officer Alessandra Bellini gave attendees an insider’s perspective on the runaway success of the grocer’s Clubcard loyalty programme.
Now in its 28th year, the iconic initiative was the first of its kind in the UK when it was launched by Dunnhumby in 1995 and has revolutionised the ways in which supermarkets operate.
Enabling shoppers to buy goods at discounted rewards and offering them numerous benefits – the Clubcard programme has supercharged Tesco’s status, giving it mass appeal, as Bellini explained:
“Clubcard is open to everyone, it’s actually really easy to get one and you’ll get better pricing at Tesco than if you don’t have one. Tesco is a very open welcoming democratic brand. We don’t want to be elitist. We don’t want to exclude anyone. We don’t want to make it difficult for anyone to shop at Tesco.”
It’s hard to overstate how much of a juggernaut the Clubcard has become within the loyalty space, and British culture more generally. Bellini went on to reveal that there are now close to 22 million Clubcard members – a staggering amount considering that the total estimated number of households in the UK is currently hovering at just above 28 million.
The efficiency of the programme lies mostly in its personalisation, with the data gathered from its extensive user base helping Tesco to tweak it to perfection.
Bellini continued: “In the last three years, we’ve done a lot of work to really transform the experience that customers have with Clubcard to really look at the way they engage, how they get value, and obviously by having more data, we can now adapt those journeys, those values, those rewards in a much more tailored way.
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“This was we can make sure that if something doesn’t work, we know instantly and it doesn’t take us months and months of research and questionnaires, but actually we see it in the moment.”
Incredibly, Bellini also revealed that Clubcards are used across 80% of all Tesco transactions, with offers the grocer a uniquely accurate measurement opportunity.
The blanket use of Clubcards by the majority of its customers enables Tesco to extract highly accurate data almost immediately and at an impressive scale.
“When we work with our brand partner, we can now offer the opportunity of really targeting their customers and their consumers in a very precise way, and we can measure the sales immediately,” Bellini said.
“That’s why we relaunched the work that we do with Dunnhumby, the Tesco Retail Media Insights platform. It’s really the idea of giving power to the brand strategy, and then having one closed loop – the biggest grocery closed loop you can have – because you can measure absolutely what the sales impact is, and not just what the claimed purchase behaviour is.”
Going from strength to strength, the programme has now cemented itself into the British psyche as a veritable fixture of pop culture. This is in no small part due to BBH’s imaginative and catchy spots, with its latest creative platform centred around ‘The Power’ by Snap proving eminently memorable.
