One grocery retailer that has demonstrated the power of customer intelligence, loyalty and culture is UK-based Tesco. The company's Clubcard loyalty program generates more than a hundred million pounds of incremental sales each year, and has more than 10 million members. Indeed, Tesco has passed up Sainsbury to become the country's number one grocer.

Tesco "started with a belief that understanding their customers was fundamental to running a successful retail business," explains Clive Humby, co-author of the new book Scoring Points and a consultant to the retailer. "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."

In a recent CRM Guru interview, Humby has an interesting way of describing how Tesco profiles its customers: "[W]hen you stand in the queue looking at the guy in front of you and what they’re buying in that supermarket trolley, you form a picture of them, don’t you? The clever thing that we do is see that in the trolley from the items that are there. So, it’s not actually being able to track the items. The items, themselves, are irrelevant. We’ve got this algorithm that allows the items to describe the customer. That’s a clever thing, and that creates all these different languages that we use, these segmentations, the languages of the customer that says it’s convenience-driven, they’re concerned about their health, they’re looking for value for money, they like promotions."