Why supermarkets are snooping - and then bombarding us - about our shopping habits

If the Olympics, the European Football Championship or other major sporting event ends up getting cancelled this summer due to Covid, then never fear: there’s a new game in town – let’s call it Supermarket Sports Day – and it’s sweeping the nation.

Earlier this week, Daily Telegraph reader John Dickinson explained on the letters page how Marks & Spencer had sent him an email congratulating him on being “the third highest purchaser of tenderstem broccoli” in its Berkhamsted branch.

Another reader, Judy Spector, then wrote to explain that Ocado had named her the biggest buyer of Whiskas Senior cat food in the whole of East Sussex.

Meanwhile, Jon Price was informed by Sainsbury’s that he was 2019’s number one buyer of Multiseed Folded Flatbreads on the Wirral, and Mike Cattrall told us that his wife was the eighth biggest purchaser of rosé wine in M&S’s Doncaster branch last August. “She is, however, aiming for a podium finish this summer and I will be offering my full support,” Mr Cattrall added.

So what’s going on? Why are shoppers being inundated with amusing yet seemingly useless information about their shopping habits? And should we be worried?

Welcome to the latest buzzword in the highly competitive world of food retailing: personalisation. Supermarkets believe that the reams of data we give to them every time we shop can be used to create a closer, “personalised” relationship between us and them. Hence the emails and bespoke statistics.

It’s an attempt by Sainsbury’s, Ocado, M&S and the rest to show that they’re not vast faceless corporations. Rather, they’re our friends. They’re local shops that know our names and our buying habits, and can offer us discounts accordingly. In corporate retail parlance, their emails and videos are all part of their efforts to drive loyalty and enhance the customer’s experience.

In general, the emails about being an expert broccoli buyer are not accompanied with money-off vouchers for your next broccoli purchase. The statistics are more about bragging rights. However this differs from supermarket to supermarket. One reader did receive a free box of Puffed Wheat for buying so much of the product in a west London store.

Loyalty schemes have been around since the mid-1990s when Tesco launched its hugely successful Clubcard. Supermarkets have for years talked about mining data to tailor particular offers to particular customers. But recent advances in technology have taken the notion of loyalty to new levels: the surge in card payments, online shopping and use of smartphone apps to allow chains to gather and analyse our data to the most granular degree.

“Supermarkets have been sitting on banks of information for decades and not really mining it. They’ve found it very difficult to work out a way of having a personal relationship with the customers,” says Clive Black, a veteran food retail analyst at investment group Shore Capital. “This is the start of a breakthrough in personalisation. Before now, you were clustered in bigger groups – if you bought dog food, they might realise you had a pet, or if they saw nappies, you were part of the baby cohort. But it’s now gone from general clusters to much more refined personalisation.”

Analysing data not only allows businesses to understand their customers but it allows them to share this information back. Spotify, the music streaming platform, does this very well with its end-of-year Wrapped feature, whereby it tells subscribers the songs, genres and artists they’ve listened most to over the previous 12 months. It makes playlists of their favourite songs and, as a feature, is both usable and interestingly geeky.

But broccoli and cat food? I’m not sure the Spotification of data by supermarkets is really necessary. It works with streaming because it’s entertainment. You can explore genres similar to the ones you favour or you can put your headphones on and listen to your favourite tracks. But food?

I contacted a number of the shoppers who wrote to us about their food-buying emails and asked them if such things have made them any more loyal to the supermarkets behind them.

“I don’t think it’ll make any difference, to be honest,” says Doncaster’s big rosé drinker, Mr Cattrall. “We don’t shop [at M&S] any more frequently and I don’t think we spend any more money there. It was just an amusing thing.”

“I don’t think it does make me feel more loyal, actually,” says Mrs Spector, Ocado’s Whiskas champion of East Sussex, “I am still going to shop where I get the best service.” As with Mr Cattrall, her accolade was more amusing than anything else. She told all her family. “It’s a funny thing to brag about really, isn’t it?” she adds, clearly still tickled.

Meanwhile, Mr Dickinson says that when he received his email from M&S about his broccoli-buying prowess, he thought it both ridiculous and humorous. “I worked in sales all my life and I thought: ‘What a crazy thing that someone has actually sat down and thought that if they write to someone congratulating them on buying more tenderstem broccoli than anyone else, then they will perhaps go out and buy a bit more.’ I don’t know what they’re thinking about, to be honest with you.”

And this is, perhaps, the issue. Loyalty schemes obviously have their place. They can increase sales and offer money-off discounts to consumers. But there’s almost too much data out there: the world is in danger of getting pointlessly personal. Food analyst Black believes this could be a problem.

“When Tesco introduced Clubcard in 1995, it was revolutionary – it really was – and the uptake was massive. But by the time you need three wallets to carry all the loyalty cards that Mothercare and Wallis and Sainsbury’s have had, it loses its value. It’s the same here: every digital retailer has got your data because you’re buying online, but if personalisation reaches its natural course then you could have people getting sick and tired of it,” he says.

Gemma Brockbank, a member of the Loyalty Programme Team at M&S, says that its Sparks reward scheme allows it to “speak to customers about offers and items relevant to them”. She says the ranking system of various products in different regions “is just an added layer of fun, helping to strengthen our relationships and create some light-hearted bragging rights among customers, too.”

However, privacy remains a concern. Mrs Spector says she thought Ocado’s email was “rather Big Brother”. And a day or so after she received it, there was another email from the online retailer saying that it valued people’s privacy, leading Mrs Spector to suggest another customer may have complained about data protection issues. As Black says, there are people who’ll think that personalised emails are “really nice” and those who’ll think “‘This is a bit Orwellian, and what else do they know about me?’” Supermarkets, like all companies, are guided by strict data protection guidelines.

There’s an irony here. The supermarkets that have performed the strongest in the UK in recent years are Lidl, Aldi, B&M Stores and Home Bargains, discount stores that haven’t had loyalty schemes (although Lidl last year launched an electronic loyalty scheme on an app). They have succeeded by concentrating on simpler metrics such as price and their product ranges. All of this goes to show that the competitive advantages of using data and personalisation “are still to be proven on a long-term basis”, says Black.

But there is one winner in all this. Barney, Mrs Spector’s cat. She jokes that she shared her news with him. “I’m sure he’ll eat more as a result now that he knows that I’m well-stocked.”

At least there’s one form of loyalty that is likely to last.