What Your Supermarket Spend Is Saying About You?
Anthony Morris of The Tecsa Group discusses how supermarkets and evolved loyalty programmes are creating a seamless shopping experience for shoppers.
12 October 2024
Share this exclusive content from Saladplate
Supermarkets are meticulously planning every detail of your shopping experience, even if you aren’t thinking beyond your weekly list. | Photo Credit: Envato Elements
It’s easy to think of a supermarket as just an all-in-one place for you to get all your necessities. We may not be putting much thought into the process of shopping, beyond the weekly or monthly lists for meals, snacks and toiletries – but rest assured, supermarkets are.
In this age of data analytics and consumer insights, supermarkets are in a unique position to collect a massive amount of customer data through their loyalty programmes, which can be used to understand shopping habits more closely. “When you’re seeing customers over time, you get to understand and anticipate their demand,” says CEO of The Tecsa Group, Anthony Morris. “One of the challenges we see is with some retailers, where customers come in much less frequently, it’s harder to build up a view of what that particular customer may want.” The Tecsa Group is a consulting firm that specialises in the development and evolution of loyalty programmes. Their clients include supermarkets across the globe including brands in the UK, Hong Kong, Singapore and Australia.
The continuous customer interactions provide supermarkets with a wealth of data to analyse, making their insights particularly compelling. | Photo Credit: Envato Elements
What makes the analysis of supermarket data interesting is the frequent customer interaction, which gives them so much data to analyse. “It really helps them get to know their customers in a way that a lot of other retailers find more difficult,” says Morris. It helps to paint a picture of the customer and their lifestyle. From supermarket spend, it’s easier to deduce if that customer has children or a pet, or if they lead a healthy lifestyle, or not.
This knowledge is visible on the shelves.
“Supermarkets for a long time have looked at product adjacencies. So, what types of products go with other types of products.” Morris explains. “Typically, supermarkets wouldn’t put the same product in two places – so all your cheese would go in one place, all the meats in another etc. But now that they understand that you might buy, for example, cheese and biscuits together, you might find them placed together.”
Tecsa is also working on multi-partner programmes with their clients, where different retailers come together to offer greater value to a consumer. This is often anchored by a major retailer or service, like a bank, or a supermarket. Says Morris, “The exciting thing about multi-partner programmes is, as you start to add additional partners and, and create an ecosystem, you get that richer understanding of customers.” One example is the yuu rewards programme and its accompanying app that Tecsa launched alongside Dairy Farm Industries (DFI) in Hong Kong in 2020. “yuu is a very app-centric experience and opens up a lot of new opportunities because you’re carrying a phone all the time. It’s very seamless and doesn’t require me to have little slips of paper coupons or streams of emails if I can just get it in the app that I’m shopping through anyway,” explains Morris. “I think it’s that seamless journey which makes it a win for customers. And that’s why we’re seeing a real change in engagement.”
Photo credit: yuu Rewards Club/Tecsa Group
CEO of The Tecsa Group, Anthony Morris – Tecsa helps global businesses build better relationships with their customers through data | Photo Credit: Tecsa Group
Photo Credit: yuu Rewards Club/Tecsa Group
Photo credit: Next Meats
With yuu, Tecsa has seen very good penetration, launching with five million members in Hong Kong (out of a population of just under 7.5 million). He credits that to a strong group of partners (including Maxim’s Group of restaurants, Pizza Hut, IKEA and Market Place) and high visibility when the programme launched. “Partners benefit from the frequent interaction customers have with the app,” he says, while a varied list of partners is exciting to customers in return. “Being able to earn points from regular spend and to able to use it to redeem holidays and flights – that’s very exciting and offers very tangible value.”
Ultimately, Morris believes the success of their client work has largely come from building trust and engagement with customers. “Good retail is about building engagement with customers and building trust so that the customer looks to that retailer for what they want.” Going forward, Tecsa is looking to build its proprietary retail analytics platform and make data science more accessible to more kinds of retailers. “A platform that is quick to implement, can help retailers of different sizes benefit from the latest data science,” says Morris, highlighting their use of Gen AI, which has been having positive benefits to their work. “It’s very good at finding narratives and stories,” he explains, giving the example of how it can help to analyse store performance and create a story that helps them prioritise the next steps. “It can help pick through and prioritise drivers to help understand and find the story/theme. It’s not doing the calculations, but it can find the overall theme and stories.”
Author: Karen Fong
Karen Fong is a Singapore-based writer and editor who has previously spent time in Hong Kong, Shanghai and Canada. She writes parenting, lifestyle and travel content and has worked with publications including The Singapore Women’s Weekly, DestinAsian, Travel+Leisure Southeast Asia and Prestige Hong Kong.
