Nisa and Jisp have ended their strategic partnership, with the loyalty firm instead focusing on partnerships with other wholesalers, Better Retailing can exclusively reveal.

Rewards and loyalty will “no longer be powered by Nisa stores without a Jisp badge on it”, Ilann Hepworth, managing director of Jisp, told Better Retailing.

A Nisa spokesperson said: “As we continue to evolve our customer offer, we did explore the opportunity of a strategic partnership last year, but based on the results and feedback from some retailers and suppliers, it’s not something we continued with. Nisa retailers are free to work with third partners at their own discretion and can continue to get access to Jisp if this suits their business. Any marketing or in-store tools are provided directly by Jisp and aren’t co-branded.”

Jisp’s Hepworth continued: “We’ve always operated independently of Nisa, and worked to deliver the best deals for Nisa retailers. We still work with Nisa – we have 183 Nisa stores have a Jisp badge above the door.

“We’ve been negotiating with our brand partners, of which we have about 46 now, and we’ve been incrementally negotiating the discount for the benefit of Nisa shoppers and retailers. Sadly, we were hoping that a [Nisa-partnered] loyalty and rewards scheme would become synonymous across the estate.”

“The aspiration was that this would be a Nisa badge, saying ‘Nisa loyalty powered by Jisp’. The proposition would’ve been supported by Nisa commercially and operationally, and this isn’t going to happen.”

Recruitment to continue

Hepworth said that the partnership with the symbol group is still ongoing, with Jisp still recruiting Nisa stores. 

Jisp is currently working on an “acceleration” in partnering with wholesalers and suppliers to add more offers for retailers in cash and carries. Under the scheme, already in a number of Confex affiliated wholesale branches, retailers use a Jisp app to reveal exclusive discounts by scanning wholesale barcodes.

Hepworth explained: “Our brand partners will lead us to a solution, which is connecting wholesale loyalty to retailers, and then retail loyalty to shoppers. We can’t miss out the wholesalers, because they deliver significant benefits to the retailers, as the retailers deliver significant benefits to the shoppers.”

To date, Jisp has signed up 12 wholesalers, “representing thousands of retailers”.

“That’s where the scale of opportunity becomes really evident,” Hepworth said.

Future trends

Looking ahead to retail trends for the next few years, Hepworth said that there is a “retail media proposition” involving communicating with shoppers through technology. Supermarkets are already capitalising on the trend, soliciting advertising revenue from suppliers with digital screens in store.

The Jisp boss said there are a lot of benefits in collaboration with brands on technology channels through which you become “mutually educated on what shoppers do, how they do it, and where they start and finish their journey”.

“So I think a really interesting mix of collaboration based on communication and looking at connected media channels, whether that’s in store screens, shelf edge screens, online media.

“Then it’s the sharing access to that media and the subsequent sharing of the insights that are driven from the activity from that media. That’s where I think the quantum leap is going to happen. I don’t think there’s going to be a new gadget or gizmo that comes in. The future narrative is to understand who’s consuming [your products] and when [through collected data].”

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