Key takeaways:
- Instead of hammering home value-based messaging, Sainsbury’s recent ‘Your Nectar Prices’ campaign focused on personalised shopping experiences – making customers the hero.
- Despite parliamentary debates and regulatory scrutiny, loyalty-based pricing has proven commercially successful and is here to stay.
- Done right, personalised prices are a win-win for everyone. Supermarkets reduce wasteful promotional spending, supplier funding is targeted more effectively, and customers receive discounts on products they actually want.
Making customers the hero.
Last summer, Sainsbury’s launched a new advertising campaign. You may be forgiven for thinking, “so what?” A supermarket launches a new advertising campaign, what a shock! A fair reaction, and normally you’d be right – but this one was a little different.
Many recent campaigns have centred almost exclusively on price. Think Aldi’s brand comparisons, Asda’s ‘Asda Price’, or more recently Tesco relaunching their classic blue and white stripes with their ‘Big on Brands’ messaging. Against a backdrop of inflationary pressures and consumer uncertainty, this makes complete sense. Everyone is feeling the squeeze of higher bills, and you cannot open a paper or watch the news without feeling like the world is close to boiling over.
Instead of centring the advert purely around price, Sainsbury’s made Wayne the centre of the campaign. Now, who is Wayne? Honestly, not a clue – and that does not matter, because Wayne is a stand-in for the viewer.
The advert is smart. All the signage is renamed to Waynesbury’s, colleagues are face-swapped to represent Wayne, and even the bags are changed. This is all to support the launch of ‘Your Nectar Prices’ – personalised prices on the items you want, or at least what Sainsbury’s thinks you want.
The advert ends with Wayne leaving Waynesbury’s and another customer, Elaine, arriving. The signage changes to Elainesbury’s, reinforcing the idea that Sainsbury’s is personalised for everyone. It’s clever advertising (credit to New Commercial Arts) and a genuinely customer-centric way to demonstrate the power of personalisation.
Personalised pricing was inevitable.
Personalised prices were always going to arrive. Ever since the launch of Clubcard Prices in 2020, more widespread adoption felt inevitable. This has created what is often referred to as a ‘two-tier pricing system’ and has attracted plenty of negative press for both Tesco and Sainsbury’s – arguably the two biggest proponents of the strategy.
Despite this, backlash has clearly not impacted business performance. Tesco’s share price, for example, is up almost 16% year on year at the time of writing, and up 39% over the last five years [Source: Google Finance].
Criticism was not unexpected – personalised pricingand even triggered debates in Parliament and attracted the ire of the Competition and Markets Authority (in relation to the ethics of locking cheaper prices behind loyalty schemes). But Pandora’s box is well and truly open, and other industries have been doing this for years (airlines, we’ are looking at you – we know you’re reading our cookies).
‘Waynesbury’s’ represents a turning point in how these schemes are advertised. Yes, the savings and money off are visible, but the core message is that this is for you. You’re getting your own experience that’s uniquely yours. This is now possible and will only become more powerful as the volume of data companies can process continues to grow alongside increasing model complexity and accuracy. Think Spotify’s ‘For You’ playlists, but instead of music recommendations, you receive discounts on products you genuinely want.
A win-win for customers, supermarkets and suppliers.
In principle, everyone should benefit from personalised pricing. Supermarkets can focus promotional spend at the customer level, reducing inefficient price investment. Suppliers can target specific customer groups and work with retailers to invest funding budgets more effectively. And, most importantly, customers receive offers for products they’re actually interested in, rather than generic category or basket-level promotions.
That said, campaigns such as this operate on a knife edge as customers decide whether they trust the personalisation being offered. That’s why effectively communicating campaigns like this matter. They lean into the benefits of personalisation and help customers feel that it’s about them, not just the bottom line.
At HyperFinity, we unlock the full potential of your loyalty data. Our expertise in data science and AI helps you move beyond blanket offers to deliver personalised loyalty at scale. Get in touch to discover how we can turn your data into measurable loyalty growth.
