As the owners of a small business with just 30 members of staff, Edwina Dunn and her husband Clive Humby shouldn't have been in Tesco's boardroom.
Yet back in 1994 they had been invited to give a presentation to Tesco's directors.
What Ms Dunn and Mr Humby said that day enabled the supermarket group to double its market share in little more than a year, transformed the way many of us shop, and ultimately made the couple multimillionaires.
After they had finished their presentation, an awkward silence followed for more than a minute.
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The thing to remember is that data was thrown away in those days... there was no such thing as data mining or data profiling, this was all new”
Edwina Dunn
This was eventually broken by Tesco's then chairman, Lord MacLaurin, who made a remark that has gone down in the supermarket's folklore: "What scares me about this is that you know more about my customers after three months than I know after 30 years."
So what was the secret of Ms Dunn and Mr Humby's presentation?
They had shown the Tesco board that their tiny business had the software and skills to do something the supermarket group hadn't been able to do for itself - work out almost exactly what Tesco's customers were buying.
Ms Dunn, now 56, says: "It was the defining moment."
Tesco quickly gave the couple a long-term contract and used their expertise to launch the Tesco Clubcard, the world's first supermarket loyalty card.
As the owners of a small business with just 30 members of staff, Edwina Dunn and her husband Clive Humby shouldn't have been in Tesco's boardroom.
Yet back in 1994 they had been invited to give a presentation to Tesco's directors.
What Ms Dunn and Mr Humby said that day enabled the supermarket group to double its market share in little more than a year, transformed the way many of us shop, and ultimately made the couple multimillionaires.
After they had finished their presentation, an awkward silence followed for more than a minute.
Continue reading the main story
“Start Quote
The thing to remember is that data was thrown away in those days... there was no such thing as data mining or data profiling, this was all new”
Edwina Dunn
This was eventually broken by Tesco's then chairman, Lord MacLaurin, who made a remark that has gone down in the supermarket's folklore: "What scares me about this is that you know more about my customers after three months than I know after 30 years."
So what was the secret of Ms Dunn and Mr Humby's presentation?
They had shown the Tesco board that their tiny business had the software and skills to do something the supermarket group hadn't been able to do for itself - work out almost exactly what Tesco's customers were buying.
Ms Dunn, now 56, says: "It was the defining moment."
Tesco quickly gave the couple a long-term contract and used their expertise to launch the Tesco Clubcard, the world's first supermarket loyalty card.
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