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Naomi Kasolowsky, Group Insight and Foresight Director, Tesco

Naomi Kasolowsky, Group Insight and Foresight Director, Tesco

Describe your career to date

After graduating with a Computer Science degree, I joined Accenture in technology. I’ve always loved solving problems, so starting out in consulting was a good fit for me. My first few projects were all in the systems engineering and data architecture space – for the French retailer FNAC, NatWest Bank, Vodafone and Dixons Carphone.

A big highlight was leading the data and technical architecture delivery for the Nectar launch with Sainsbury’s. This sparked a love for retail and how to engage and grow value with customers. I spotted an opportunity at Accenture to fill a gap in our global offerings for loyalty programmes and created a significant business within a couple of years.

After having two children, I moved to Dunnhumby to lead the global capability for customer strategy and loyalty products and services, including the P&L, offering development, sales strategy, marketing and ventures.

I took a short break before my third children started school and then moved to Marks & Spencer to lead insight for clothing/home and food in the wheelhouse of the turnaround strategy. I left M&S for Tesco, where I report to the chief customer officer and my responsibility is to embed insight in decisions that help us double Tesco brand NPS, deliver Britain’s easiest shopping trip, increase the number of high value customers and deliver market share targets.

What stage has your organisation reached on its data maturity journey?

Tesco was a first mover in data-driven retailing, having created Tesco Clubcard. As a complex business in direct-to-consumer retail, wholesale, telecommunications and banking, serving customers in both physical and digital channels, we are quite mature for both data generation, usage and monetisation.

Tell us about the data and analytics resources you are responsible for

I am responsible for generating market, competitor, customer and colleague insight that we use to shape our strategies and propositions. My team is part of the customer function but we collaborate closely with technology, online, product, channels and the people team. We operate as a matrix with teams in all Tesco operating countries (UK, Ireland, CZ, Slovakia and Hungary) and with teams in India and Dunnhumby. The workplan is determined centrally.

Too many people think of data as something “other” or “added” to their day job but, really, data is information that helps to explain things and optimise decisions and is an output of more concrete things like customers, products, prices and visits, clicks and all the elements that make a business and a brand what it is.

I think the issue stems from poor data storytelling, an over-emphasis on numbers, and technology barriers that make access a challenge and can put people off. Once you work out how to make it all seem more tangible, people usually want more data and more insight and it helps them outperform.

Have you set out a vision for data? If so, what is it aiming for and does it embrace the whole organisation or just the data function?

We have a vision for data in our function and we anchor it within the strategy defined by the technology team who own the standards and processes and enable the rest of the business to work with data. We are strategic about what we need to onboard and why, as it can consume too much time and attention otherwise.

Have you been able to fix the data foundations of your organisation, particularly with regard to data quality?

We have put our major emphasis on timeliness of data and fusing both small data and big data to get a complete view of a customer. As an analytical team, our data needs are not operationally mission critical; however, we do need to join and process a complex web of data to generate insights and, for that, timeliness and availability is key.

Naomi Kasolowsky
has been included in:

100 Brands 2023 (EMEA)