As shoppers increasingly spread their spend across supermarkets, Simon Betts, UK country leader at Catalina, looks at what retailers can do to win a greater share of the basket this Golden Quarter, and why more promotions aren’t necessarily the answer
I’ve spent more than 20 years working in retail, including on the retailer side at Tesco, and there’s one word we’ve probably talked about more than almost any other and that’s loyalty.
How do we get customers to come back? How do we increase frequency? How do we win a bigger share of their weekly shop?
As we head into the Golden Quarter, those questions become even more important, but we need to be realistic about what loyalty looks like in 2026. Shoppers haven’t stopped being loyal, they’ve just become much more willing to spread that loyalty around.
New YouGov research we commissioned at Catalina found 28% of UK adults are shopping across multiple supermarkets more often than they were a year ago. The same proportion are spending more time searching for promotions and discounts, while one in three (34%) are using loyalty card discounts more often.
For retailers, that should ring a few alarm bells. The customer standing in your store on Tuesday might be in your competitor’s on Friday. Having your loyalty card in their wallet or your app on their phone doesn’t necessarily mean you have their loyalty or their whole basket.
The opportunity for retailers is to use the data they already have to understand those changing behaviours and give shoppers a genuinely relevant reason to choose them again. And, as our research shows, that doesn’t necessarily mean throwing more promotions at them.
Seven in ten adults (70%) told us they would be more likely to shop at their supermarket of choice if it offered personalised rewards based on products they regularly buy, whether that’s money-off coupons, bonus loyalty points or free products.
When we asked shoppers to choose the single most effective way a supermarket could keep them loyal, money-off coupons for products they regularly buy came out on top, selected by 29%.
The important words there are products they regularly buy. That’s the difference between simply discounting and delivering something genuinely valuable.
Give me 50p off something I have never bought and don’t want, and I’m probably going to ignore it. Give me money off something that goes into my basket every week and suddenly you’ve given me a reason to come back.
It sounds incredibly simple, but relevance is where the real opportunity lies.
Every transaction tells you something about a shopper – what they buy, how frequently they visit, what they buy together, when their habits start to change and what brings them back.
At Catalina, this is what we spend our time looking at – billions of transactions that help us understand what people actually do, rather than relying purely on what they tell us they do.
And increasingly, what we’re seeing is that there isn’t really a ‘typical shopper’. Someone can buy broadly the same basket for years and then suddenly change. Cost pressures, a new health goal or a change in family circumstances can all shift behaviour. We’re even seeing major trends such as GLP-1 weight-loss treatments beginning to change what and how much people buy.
I also know from experience that historical loyalty doesn’t guarantee future loyalty. The challenge for retailers isn’t simply collecting more customer data, it’s turning that data into something useful quickly enough to recognise when behaviour changes and act on it.
That becomes particularly important during the Golden Quarter, when shoppers are surrounded by Christmas offers, Black Friday messages and loyalty incentives, all competing for their attention and spend.
Timing also matters as much as targeting. Christmas spending decisions start long before December, so spotting an early change in behaviour gives retailers the chance to act before that spend goes elsewhere. We’ve run campaigns that reward shoppers for spending over a number of weeks to earn a Christmas bonus or target them with relevant offers months out to help spread the cost of the big day. It’s an approach we’re increasingly seeing retailers use to lock in festive spend early.
Blanket discounting can drive volume, but it can also mean giving away margin to people who would have bought the product anyway. Instead of asking, ‘What promotion can we send everyone?’, the better question is, ‘What would give this particular customer a reason to come back to us for their next top-up shop in a few days’ time?’
For one shopper that might be money off a regular family staple, for another, an incentive to return to a category they haven’t bought recently. At Christmas, it could mean encouraging someone to trade up to a more premium product or giving them a reason to buy more of the big-day shop with you rather than splitting that spend across several retailers. So it’s the same retailer but very different customers. That is where shopper intelligence becomes commercially useful. Here at Catalina, this is where we can really help to understand those differences so retailers can turn them into relevant action.
October marks the second year of our Long Live the Coupon campaign and National Coupon Awareness Month at Catalina, and there’s a reason the coupon remains so important to us. It’s where our story began. Back in 1983, Catalina pioneered the checkout coupon, using scanner data to give shoppers targeted offers based on what they actually bought.
More than 40 years later, the technology has changed enormously, but the principle hasn’t: understand your shopper, give them something relevant and measure whether it changed their behaviour.
Today that can happen across physical and digital channels, using real-time transaction data and advanced analytics to identify audiences, activate personalised marketing and measure what actually happened afterwards.
We analyse 15 billion transactions annually and work with more than 500 brands, but the interesting bit isn’t the size of the data, it’s what retailers can do with it.
Did that customer come back? Did they make another trip? Did they spend more? Did the activity generate incremental sales rather than simply rewarding behaviour that would have happened anyway? Those are the questions that matter commercially.
And this isn’t only a conversation for the UK’s biggest supermarkets. Smaller and regional retail chains can gain just as much from understanding their shoppers at this level. They may not have the budgets or scale of the major grocers, but they don’t need to be everything to everyone. They need to understand the customers they already have and give them compelling reasons to return.
Perhaps that’s the biggest change in loyalty. We used to think about it as something relatively fixed – win a customer, give them a card, keep them coming back. Today’s shopper has more information, more offers and more reasons to look around, and our research suggests they’re doing exactly that.
So this Golden Quarter, I’d be asking how many of your loyalty scheme members are genuinely choosing you, what will bring them back again next week, and how much more of their Christmas spend you could win.
If you want to win more shopper loyalty this Golden Quarter, it’s not too late. We can help you turn customer insight into action and give shoppers a reason to choose you again. Come and talk to us.
For more information, please visit: National Coupon Awareness Month 2026
Details can be found on Catalina UK’s official LinkedIn page
For more information about Catalina UK, visit: https://catalina.co.uk/
