Dive Brief:

• Television shopping-channel retailer QVC has tapped Sanjay Singh, who was SVP of finance at Abercrombie & Fitch until March, to lead a new customer data-analysis unit there.

• For 22 years, Singh also had several top positions at Procter & Gamble, including much time spent at the beauty division. 

• QVC is calling the unit the Business Planning & Analysis group, and the insights it generates will be used to drive growth in the U.S. and internationally, the company said.

Dive Insight:

Data in the right hands can tip a retailer off to why customers buy what they buy, and perhaps even more important, what obstacles lie in the path of purchase. QVC needs to play catch up its biggest television rival, HSN, which seems to have a good handle on growth and bringing customers back, according to Tom Forte, senior vice president and senior analyst at Brean Capital LLC, speaking to Internet Retailer magazine.

“[This hire] suggests [QVC is] trying to in this instance to catch up to HSN,” says Tom Forte, senior vice president and senior analyst at Brean Capital LLC, who points out that HSN has grown faster than QVC in the last two quarters. “The special sauce for HSN has been using big data to get the second purchase for the consumer, which is materially increasing the lifetime value of the customer.”