Joining the dots
One of Tesco’s biggest assets has been its use of the Clubcard, laughingly known as a loyalty card. I say laughingly because if you think it was invented to reward Tesco shoppers, you’re flat wrong. It was invented to make Tesco shoppers buy more, by tracking what they’d already bought. The Guardian ran a story about the Clubcard when the inventors retired in their early 50s in October this year. And like most newspapers, it got parts of the story completely wrong and made-up other parts.
And reader I know, because I was there. Clive Humby, half of Humby Dunn, worked in the same room as me at CACI, before the company distinguished itself by not providing interrogators at Guantanamo Bay, the closest thing to a concentration camp seen in the West since 1945. As the chairman, Jack London, was at great pains to point out, they only provided interrogators in Iraq, not Guantanamo. Iraq was of course where Lynndie England had her fun humiliating captives at Abu Ghraib, so it’s not as if it’s the same kind of place at all.
This ain't about you, buddy. It's about people like you.
What’s this got to do with the price of cheese? Well, quite a lot. This is a picture of Ms Lynndie England, whose boss, Brigadier General Karpinski, said she herself wasn’t even allowed into interrogations because they were run by private contractors. Like CACI, for example. And Lynndie was prably jist funnin’ anyways.
Edwina Dunn and Clive Hunby, the brains behind Clubcard, worked at the UK arm of CACI. And yes, I am aware how fatally easily to think ‘oh, Clive Dunn.’ But don’t. Neither he nor they nor Tesco had anything directly to do with torture, except to people’s waistlines. But let’s join the dots and go over some basics.
Whatever the US branch of CACI got up to, the English version was characterised by stifling jobsworth dullness. It was built chiefly around a product called ACORN which took the Census data, mostly matched it with postcode data and came up with a profile of the lifestyles characterised by spending – it was all in the Census – of the kind of people who lived in a specific postcode. Sort-of. At the time of the Census. Very generally. There used to be a good booklet the company put out explaining how it all worked but then they appointed a Marketing Manager whose first move was to hire herself an assistant (odd, given the year before they hadn’t even needed a Marketing Manager) so there wasn’t any marketing budget left to pay for the booklet, so we had to explain the idea to potential clients without it.
ACORN is still in use, despite the efforts of the Marketing Manager and as you can see from the example for here in Yoxford, aside from the crassness of much of the writing (“holiday homes are popular”) it gives something of an idea of the sociographics of comparative geographies, as we used to say. You put the postcode in, you get the profile out.
But back to the Guardian’s puffery for DunnHumby. I never worked with Mrs Humby, but I remember a major falling out Clive had with the MD over why CACI should pay for his mobile phone, especially as he was bringing-in a quarter of a million pounds per year in revenue, more than anyone other individual in the company. The MD couldn’t see it at all, not least because he didn’t have one, but then he was never known to go and see any clients either.
But dynamic as Clive was, and although quite large he was also a karate black belt, if he left CACI in 1989 then it’s odd he had the falling-out with the MD over a year later, in the office. Anyway, Clive left CACI, the MD patted himself on the back for saving the company the cost of a mobile phone, Dunnhumby rejoiced in one of the ugliest names in history and Clubcard was born. Whether intentionally or not, it appealed to people so vain they probably thought it was about them. It wasn’t and it isn’t.
Clubcard is about selling customers more stuff. It does that by recording what individuals buy and then looking at the combinations of what they bought in the abstract. If people in smaller houses always buy the own-brand pasta and the cheapest ragu sauce then it’s probably time to launch own-brand ragu and do a leaflet drop around the student flats. How do you know the postcodes and addresses for the student flats? Well, that’s yer basic geodemographics, innit? That’s what ACORN does. That’s all it does. Why do you get more Clubcard points when you buy more things? Because any data system works better when it’s got more data to sift through, so it can identify more combinations, and test the combinations it sees with more accuracy. It’s not about making the customer happy. It’s about making the shareholders happy.
I didn’t know Clive very well but aside from a very few bright stars like Clive and a few fun drinkers and about two girls with some attitude most of the company were people who thought the civil service was too fast-paced, who’d come to obsess over statistics with like-minded peers. As HummbyDunn said to the Guardian, most companies back then “saw data on their customers as a drain on IT systems,” and judging by the CACI crew of those days, it was easy to see why. I remember six entire man-days spent discussing how to correct a mismatch between two files. The extent of the mismatch affected 60 houses in the whole of Wales. Time well spent, according to CACI. Irrelevant and we’re not paying for that time said the client. Nothing, said the manager who’d devoted six man days to fiddling about with rubbish that didn’t mean anything to anyone.
It’s all the same story. Data mining isn’t about people, or individuals, anymore than supermarket retailing is about good food. It is what it is. Ask Lynndie England. Ask nutritionists, or any GP who’s seen the average patient get fatter and ever more dangerously fatter as they’re more efficiently marketed at.
Very little helps
Anyway Dunnhumby got rich, Tesco got richer, Lynndie England got three years and I’m sitting in the shop on a snow-bound quiet winter afternoon writing this. What do I know? Aside from recognising a huge misapprehension that supermarkets are about good food when I see one. Don’t believe me? Ask the huge people who can’t even stand upright as they wheel their Tesco trolleys around the store. I bet they’ll think it’s all about them, too. But when the individual doesn’t count for anything much, when people quite like not being people anymore and find it suits them to be consumer units instead, when the relationship with food sours like a bitter love affair into just seeing how much of it you can stand before you stop doing it any more, very little helps.
