supermarket

Third Party Grocery Delivery? Omnichannel Grocers Wrestle With Choices

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grocery delivery

THIS MORNING on RetailWire.com I jumped on my high horse again with this little screed about grocery delivery strategies for supermarkets. As usual, I didn’t shade my opinion about 3rd party solutions, and I know some will take exception. That’s OK. The debate is important.

For perspective, when I founded the VStoreNews e-letter in 1998 I posited a world where grocery stores delivered everything – their own products plus those of other local retailers. Hasn’t happened yet.

The Grocery Delivery Debate

My comments today on RetailWire.com:

I’m squarely in the camp that advocates for own control of all customer-facing services by the retailer. High delivery costs remain a challenge, but this factor must be accounted for in a comprehensive manner. What do you really risk when you put digital moments of truth in the hands of an outside solution provider?

Third-party services intermediate the retailer’s service experience and divert essential data about shopper behavior. I could never agree to hand over control of my brand relationships to gig-workers directed by a company that is angling to become my competitor.

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Independent Grocers – 3 Ways to Gain a Trade Promotions Edge

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NGA, LAS VEGAS – When it comes to capturing their fair share of impact from trade deals, independent grocers have long struggled to match their crosstown, big-chain rivals. Scale is a key challenge. The effort and resources required to identify, negotiate, accept, implement and publish a single promotion are the same, whether the execution is for 12 stores or 1,200.

Big chains may spread these tasks across more hands, but they also suffer from promotion practice logjams and disconnects that may tend to neutralize their advantage, due to versioning complexity, duplication of effort, review and rework.

Make the Effort-to-Benefit Ratio Work for You

The opportunity is open for smaller retailers – who are inherently more consolidated, nimble and fleet of foot – to gain an edge in the promotions game. It comes down to defining and enabling promotion practices that permit streamlining and collaboration across the enterprise. Independents should explore three areas of present opportunity:

  • Streamline and connect your processes. Neutralize the scale advantage by making promotion decisions faster and adopting disciplined executional processes that offset the differential effort. Use automation to reduce and simplify steps and ensure that correct information is in play across functional areas of your business. Harmony is enabled when you successfully align the creative process with the business decisions.
  • Collaborate within your enterprise. Structure your ad process for collaboration and design connectivity throughout the lifecycle of each promotion, from planning, to execution, to measurement. Establish a consistent workflow with roles defined, assigned and tracked.
  • Collaborate with your vendors. Establish a portal-based system that transfers responsibility to vendors to enter complete information about each offered deal and makes it better for them to do so. Online accuracy will make faxes, emails and paper forms a thing of the past. Negotiations and decisions will commence faster while minimizing the need for reviews, changes and reconciliations.

These trade promotion management capabilities are enabled by software solutions but rooted in best practice. They are quite readily available now, and adopting them can be far less disruptive than you might think, especially where web-based technology is available.

The right promotional tools and processes can enable independents to exploit their natural advantages to win with shoppers and capture a fair share of deal profits.

© Copyright 2014 James Tenser
(This article was originally commissioned by Aptaris LLC. Permalink. Republished here by permission. All other rights reserved.)

NRF Bulletin: Personalization Done Right

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I’VE BEEN ON RECORD many times as a hater of shopper loyalty, but an advocate of intelligent personalization.

I admit my position can be construed as mincing words, but I remain stubbornly committed to the distinction. When marketers and retailers try to ascribe loyalty to their card-carrying customers they are usually delusional. When they demonstrate their commitment to those customers through good acts – by providing relevant values and experiences – they embark on a golden path.

Supermarket chains so regularly miss this distinction with their frequent shopper card programs that it is a small revelation to encounter one who seems to have it right. In a presentation at the National Retail Federation Convention and Expo this week in New York, Loblaw Companies, Ltd., the leading grocery operator in Canada, shared some insights about its PC Plus shopper program, launched last May, that suggest it belongs in that exclusive tier.

“From our best customers we capture 55-60% of their share of wallet. That leaves so much opportunity just with them,” said Peter Lewis, Sr. Dir., Customer Analytics & Loyalty at Loblaw (pictured at left in the photo above, with Graeme McVie, VP and GM at LoyaltyOne.)

That’s an insightful way of looking at the return from a frequent shopper program that truly distinguishes highest-value relationships and cultivates them accordingly. Best shoppers deserve our best efforts because they are our best prospects too.

Loblaw has embraced this approach with PC Plus, its digitally-enabled frequent shopper program, said Lewis. On a year-over-year basis, enrolled customers who used the targeted offers changed their behaviors in desirable ways:

  • They increased their number of visits by 12%
  • Their average basket size increased by 5%
  • The number of categories they purchase increased by 7%

Lewis also shared some statistics from the first 6 weeks of the program that indicated rapid acceptance:

  • 40% of sales were made using the card
  • More than 6,000 members were signed per store
  • 50% email open rate
  • 35% click-through rate on those emails

PC Plus uses analytics to deliver relevant, highly personalized offers. With thousands of offers available across the store, the mix is tailored down to the individual level, based on each shopper’s history.

“How big is the prize from personalization?” said Graeme McVie of LoyaltyOne, the company which helps Loblaw implement and operate PC Plus. “Even with best customers, opportunities exist to grow share of spend.” He shared an analysis of the 50 store categories across the top 20% of customers, which indicated a 50-70% share of spending, a finding which underscores the present value of best shoppers, but also their upside potential.

PC Plus is increasingly focused on the smartphone app as the “control center” for the shopper, Lewis said. It allows them to manage shopping lists from their phones, informs them of available offers, and allows them to accept offers in real time, even while waiting in the checkout lane moments before a transaction.

McVie added that the design of PC Plus is oriented toward “democratizing shopper insights.” Its strategy is two-fold: understand the needs of individual customers and consistently execute actions to satisfy them.

I’ve stated previously in this blog that we are entering a “post-loyalty” era, but intelligent personalization is far from dead. In fact it may just be hitting its stride at Loblaw.

© Copyright 2014 James Tenser

Call It Mobile Yellow

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Scan these tags!

I SPIED THE WHOLE grocery universe in a single bunch of fruit. This transcendental experience occurred just last week in West Des Moines, IA. (Quite rightly.)

It all happened in a bright, spacious HyVee supermarket in an upscale, verdant neighborhood that a decade ago was pretty much a cornfield. I entered the store thinking, “They built this, so I have come.”

But my Field of Dreams reverie dissolved when I stepped up to the produce department. My first view was an abundant display of bananas – the largest selling produce item in most supermarkets.

I pulled out my smartphone and snapped this picture, with the classic lyric by Donovan resonating in my brain like a prophetic soundtrack:

Electrical banana is gonna be a sudden craze
Electrical banana is bound to be the very next phase

You see, what really blew my mind were the two little stickers on this hand of bananas. On the left, a stacked UPC bar code and on the right a QR (quick response) 2D code. Each of these artifacts tells a little story about the impact of digital technology on our business. (Quite rightly)

The UPC bar code is of format known as RSS_14 designed to convey more information than old-style 9-digit codes. When I scan it with a gadget on my smart phone it correctly identifies the product as Dole bananas. Presumably the POS scanners in this HyVee supermarket are just as smart. The advantage: it saves the checker a few keystrokes and accurately enters the PLU (price look up) code for this variety of produce which is sold by weight.

The QR code on the right is used to direct shoppers to a web site called yonanas.com . When I scanned it with the same smart phone app, it led me to a page pitching a simple kitchen appliance that lets consumers make a soft-serve dessert from frozen ripe bananas and other fruit.

The Dole brand is featured prominently on the target Web page. Presumably there’s a deal behind it all. The Yonana appliance is marketed by Healthy Foods LLC, itself a division of Winston Products LLC in Cleveland, Ohio.

Peering at my smartphone screen under the fluorescent lights in that immaculate HyVee store in one of the greenest places in America, I found myself thinking, “It really has come to this: agricultural and digital have converged in America’s heartland.”

Then the digital banana concept set off a minor cascade of linguistic play: Bananas come in hands… Digit is Latin for finger… Smart phones are made with gorilla glass… (Quite rightly)

So in tribute to Donovan, the iconic Sunshine Superman inducted this year into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, I’d like to offer this (somewhat less lilting) variation on his theme:

Digital banana is gonna be a sudden craze
Digital banana is bound to be the very next phase
I call it mobile yellow (Quite rightly)

© Copyright 2012 James Tenser