Scoring Points: How Tesco Is Winning Customer Loyalty

Rating:
Summary: The future of marketing
Review: Excellent book
As a Marketing Graduate student we have had to read countless books into what the future holds, what the trends are, and how to become more successful in making relevant and valuable propositions for our clients. After a while you see how some books and ideas just run into each other with out making new contributions to the field

Scoring Points helps break that mold.

Clive Humby tells the story of how Tesco has managed to become one of the most successful retailers in the world, and not just talking about the high level conceptual thinking that marketers dream about, but actually performing and executing on those high end ideas.

key points; get to know your customers, Essential customer genius, great insights and one to one marketing on steroids.

Rating:
Summary: Best of its kind
Review: This is a well written book with a nice chronological writing style which makes it feel like an adventure . The author manages to avoid speaking marketing jargonese and skimp on technical specifics of how the program was implemented providing ample details of the infrastructural , logistic and IT challenges faced by the loyalty program. Also interesting is the focus on explaining the rationale of every decision Tesco has made and a unbiased assesment of whether it went right or wrong. There is also detailed description of Tesco's ever evolving segmentation strategy.

Also its amazing how Tesco links its Direct Marketing, Internet
Marketing (esp the My Favorites), and tradional store marketing to the card database and also follows the "keep-it-simple-stupid" philosophy. One of the con's of this book it that it often contains quotes from people which do not convey anything and that it really does not cover the loyalty program outside of UK.

Overall this a must read if you really want an insight into how loyalty cards can be much much more than a piece of plastic both to the retailer and the shopper.