Sainsbury’s boss Simon Roberts has defended his move to sell the grocer’s customers’ shopping habits data to TV and consumer goods manufacturers looking to target their advertising.
The chief executive told The Guardian that the supermarket protects personal data “incredibly carefully” and that its strategy had made adverts more “relevant” for shoppers.
His comments come as it was revealed last weekend that both Sainsbury’s and Tesco had made around £300m a year from selling information on individual shopping habits collected through its loyalty card schemes.
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Sainsbury’s was found to have a partnership with Channel 4 to sell its Nectar card data to tailor adverts to specific groups.
Roberts said: “Our retail media platform [works] with suppliers with anonymised customer data, very importantly, we protect our data incredibly carefully.
“What we want to do at its heart really is provide personalised messaging to customers so from what we hear from customers, they don’t want to be sent lots of marketing and media messages that aren’t relevant to them.
“By understanding customers better, it means we can target our loyalty programmes more effectively.”
The UK’s competition watchdog said last month it would investigate supermarket loyalty schemes in January following concerns that the rise of member pricing could limit competition in the market and disadvantage shoppers that had not signed up.
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