Free Marketing Dissertations - Therefore Customers Can Earn Points Using Clubcard Not Only At Tesco, But At
Therefore customers can earn points using Clubcard not only at Tesco, but at stores of any of these companies. Further the points can also be earned by purchasing fuel at Tesco petrol stations and by using their online shopping to buy music, books, flowers and electrical goods. Even the points can be earned by paying with Tesco Credit Card or by using Tesco Mobile, Tesco Home Phone and selected Tesco Financial Products. This means that customers can easily and frequently accumulate the minimum 150 points and get price-off vouchers. Other loyalty cards have also failed in the past because the retailers did not had sufficient partnerships with other popular companies and so for a customer it took many months to collect minimum points and get vouchers. Thus slowly customers lost their interest in such schemes. Tesco’s Clubcard in contrast has managed to maintain interest in the customers.
For getting a Tesco Clubcard, customers have to register by filling in a form and sending it by post or they can also register online as well as over the phone. This means that Clubcard also acts as a tool for Tesco for collecting useful marketing data related to the buying habits of individual customers. Thus there have been concerns on issues such as invasion of privacy and dissemination of information related to the customers to third parties or other companies for marketing purposes. Tesco however promises that the information is used only by the Tesco group of companies to help them develop better services and products for the customers. "Because they understand their customers, they hope they can serve them better, and so what we’ve done, right from the beginning, is not look at this program as a marketing sales promotion program, but we’ve looked at the program as a way of learning about how consumers shop, and what they want from their retailer, and therefore, not just changing the one to one communication with the customer, but changing the physical retail offer" (Clive Humby, Scoring Points). This however shows that Clubcard has definitely helped Tesco in developing better understanding of the needs of the customers and at least in that sense has been a very useful tool.
Effective Targeting of Different Customer Segments
Probably the biggest challenge that retailers face is how they can make the loyalty scheme appealing to their different customer segments. The most successful examples of innovation and evolution in retail formats are retailers that respond accurately and profitably to previously unsatisfied needs.
