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Scoring Points: How Tesco is Winning Customer Loyalty Tim Phillips, Clive Humby and Terry Hunt Kogan Page, London, 2003; ISBN: 0 7494 3578 X; 272 pp; hardback; £25
This book is essential reading for all marketers, students of marketing and everyone interested in customer loyalty and customer service. I do not use the words 'essential reading' lightly, because I know that most people drown in the readable material that circulates on the internet. This book is essential because it is the very fullest account of success in retailing in the UK that has been published for a long, long time. More importantly, it is a story of leadership in marketing and of making the idea of 'customer orientation' work - for customers and for staff. Perhaps most importantly of all, it shows that success in marketing (at least in retailing) is not a result of fads and cards, but of a strong, consistent and persistent focus on customers and their needs. The book, 'In search of excellence',1 made all management consultants and writers chary about lauding companies too much - so many of the praised companies experienced severe problems soon after the book was published. Being regarded as successful in management is a bit like marriages appearing in Hello! or other celebrity magazines. However, the Tesco story as portrayed in this book looks like it will run for a long time.
The book does not just tell the story of the Tesco Clubcard, although that is the theme that connects the chapters, which cover everything from the Clubcard philosophy and how it works in practice, through how it is supported by a comprehensive mailing programme, in all its variants (by customer and time of year), to the extension and deepening of Tesco's proposition using card data. More importantly, the book tells the story of how the Clubcard has been used to provide focus to the strong customer orientation of Tesco. Knowledge about customers, gathered through the Clubcard, is shown to be a first recourse for Tesco marketing strategists. The use of this data is shown at its most powerful in the stories about how Tesco took on Asda when the latter tried to undermine the Clubcard scheme by honouring Tesco coupons (by sending especially...