Carrefour Entices Customers to Obtain a Loyalty Card

Carrefour has attempted a very simple way to encourage shoppers to register for a loyalty card: present your Carrefour loyalty card when you shop and the company will give you a prize every time you shop for two weeks. Prizes range from a value of 50 cents to 10 euros. The catch is simply that you have to buy a Carrefour branded product. The benefits of this promotion are two-fold. First, customers who have the loyalty card will opt for the Carrefour brand instead of some other brand in order to get the coupon. Second, those customers who do not have a loyalty card will sign up, thereby giving the company access to their shopping habits and potentially becoming a loyal customer. As a future data analyst, this program is very exciting to me because it means that there will be more customer data to analyze. Grocery stores give customers loyalty cards for discounts in exchange for gathering information on their buying habits.

While the flyer for this mass marketing promotion is not particularly well designed, it serves its purpose: to raise awareness for the upcoming promotion. Being a budget brand, Carrefour is known to attract budget-conscious customers. Thus, customers don’t particularly care for some well designed flyer. They have chosen the store because of the low prices. Spending more money to create a better design and to print it on non-coupon paper would simply be lost money as that is not what customers care for. As a result, this promotion is well in-line with the brand image. Additionally, even though the company isn’t offering large cash prizes, it is giving the guarantee that each customer will be a winner every time. For some customers, especially the more budge-minded, this guarantee may be more valuable than the very small probability that they win a large sum of money.

What do you think of loyalty programs? Would you sign up and agree to have you shopping data analyzed in exchange for slightly cheaper prices?

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