Sainsbury's plans to place its Nectar loyalty card at the centre of its marketing in a bid to use the data to understand its shoppers better.

It will "significantly improve the exploitation of Nectar", it said in a job advert for a number of roles in its customer and market insights department. It wants to see improvements in the use of Nectar-based analysis as well as more proactive identification of opportunities to use the data better.

Some £1.2m will be spent in the coming year on research and analysis within the department in an effort to understand how the Nectar data can explain customer behaviour to benefit day-to-day decisions.