Supermarket opportunity update

Shopper Report, The, Nov, 2004 by Mona Doyle

All of the electronic marketing approaches to growing or holding onto traditional customers left me thinking about products and services that would reach out to customers who are shopping supermarkets less and other channels more. I'm thinking about the young and single women and men who pick up breakfast and lunch from convenience stores; the women who don't use the supermarket before their own working hours because the service departments are all closed; and the people who don't buy prepared foods from supermarkets because they don't fit their ideas of what is and isn't fresh. Here are some ideas for building supermarkets that were triggered by what the electronic marketing folks aren't saying:

1. Single serving salad bowls (Taking a lesson from convenience stores, Trader Joe's, and Whole Foods, with "fresh" single-serve and ready-to-eat salads at the front of the store for fast grab & go between home, work, and lifestyle miscellany.)

2. Stir Fry Bars (A matter of merchandising the pre-cut veggies that make great stir fries with recipes and cooking oil)

3. Cooked-to-order options for veggies and stir fries (Many supermarkets are already steaming fish and seafood for customers. They could take a freshnesspage from America's 36,000 Chinese restaurants by offering freshly grilled or stir fried veggies while customers shop.)

4. Fit customer service hours to working parents' lives. (Shopping when customer service counters are closed is inconvenient and annoying.)

5. Fit pharmacy hours to working parents' lives. (For working parents, supermarket pharmacies should be open all the hours the store is open. And supermarket chains shouldn't leave the pharmacy drive-thru services to the drug chains, which are increasingly selling what used to be supermarket merchandise.)

6. Personal scanning is a boon. It's fun and it gives shoppers control when they want it.

7. Special rewards for single shoppers. (Single shoppers could spend lots of money if they felt wanted somewhere. Instead, stores seem to want the same thing their mothers want, e.g., for them to be married with children. Make it worth their while to visit your store often, and see what happens!)

8. Incenting middle-tier shoppers. (Middle-tier shoppers don't like you all that much and almost certainly don't shop your whole store. Many would respond to incentives that showed them that shopping your store more often might be worth their while. Spending X hundreds of dollars for a free turkey doesn't mean much, because everybody does it and "Who wants a whole turkey anyway?"

9. Consider the amount of money you make from Coinstar and the number of shoppers you might attract and upgrade by providing a free coin-changing service. Before rejecting this suggestion as costly nonsense, take a look at the success of Commerce Bank, which provides coin counting as one of their valued customer services. Some shoppers would be excited about turning the pocket change into groceries.

10. Asking key questions about what products are important to your shoppers and acting on their answers. Many supermarkets have begun to ask customers if they found everything they were looking for. That's the wrong question, because shoppers who know you stopped carrying their favorite flavor have stopped looking for it in your store when they bother to shop there.

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