Nick Lansley cheerfully admits that he's a man with a past as far as what is now called the Internet of Retail is concerned.. He was intimately involved in the development of the Tesco supermarket "Club Card", loyalty initiative and data collection system back in the 1990s. Club membership rewards Tesco customers for store visits and spend. In exchange the supermarket gets to collect, manipulate and exploit vast amounts of consumer data. Twenty years on, Nick Lansley says that in the dawning of the age of the Internet of Retail, technologies are now very advanced and can very quickly pinpoint patterns in data as consumer behaviour changes. He adds that rather than attempting to fuse in-store and online shopping into a single 'omni-channel' each ought to be allowed to be different, one from the other, and should "celebrate their own uniqueness" in their value to the enterprise as a whole.

Filmed at: The Internet of Retail 9-10 February 2016, Crowne Plaza Gerrards Cross, Buckinghamshire