Booths to roll out loyalty prices in ‘fundamental’ loyalty reset

Booths is set to launch loyalty prices in a “fundamental” shake-up of its Booths Card reward scheme.

It will see the northern supermarket roll out discounted prices on around 300 of its own-label lines in stores. Booths cardholders will also get access to a suite of more “permanent” promotions and offers, including its Three for £15 on meat deals and 10% off four bottles of wine.

Collectively the discounts will equate to around 10% on average, Booths managing director Nigel Murray told The Grocer at the Food & Drink Expo in Birmingham.

The initial 300 products had been selected from own-label lines that Booths customers buy most frequently. It includes strawberries, vegetables and fillet steaks.

Murray said that Booths had decided to introduce the “fairly fundamental changes” as it to wanted to do more to reward its most “loyal shoppers”. Currently, cardholders are given 5% back on the purchase of selected items, in the form of paper vouchers they can then redeem in store.

“There are around 18 million visitors to the Lake District every year – and a good proportion of them visit two of our stores in Windermere and Keswick,” he said.

“That mechanism simply wasn’t relevant to them. They are not frequent customers, but they are regular customers as they come to us every time they come to the Lake District. So how do we reward those people instantly when they come to store?”

Running a paper-based voucher system was also “really, really expensive”, Murray said. The changes would be rolled out to Booths’ 26 stores “imminently” he said. 

Booths had chosen to concentrate the savings on its own label products, which it manufactures, rather than on branded groceries.

“Critically what we are not doing is essentially promoting what our suppliers are pushing us to promote, we are promoting what our customers want us to promote.”

Currently, around 50% of Booths’ volume was purchased using a rewards card, Murray said, which meant there was plenty of “opportunity” to grow the scheme.

The retailer is not yet able to offer personalised prices, as it is still working to complete a multi-year upgrade of its core IT infrastructure. It completed the rollout of a new ERM system in March, and is now working to improve its ability to handle data.