The Consumer Eye - September Edition

(A short rant by Brett Goldhawk)

Have standards generally dropped across British Supermarkets?

And do we, as consumers, only really care about the price and less about the shopping experience? Which is a worrying thought when you consider that, on average, we spend around 6 hours a month do our grocery shop.

We therefore shouldn’t accept mediocrity or sub-standard experiences.

To test the theory, I visited a number of Supermarkets in my local area this weekend and it was glaringly obvious that there are some re-occurring themes…

? The shelves are a shambles, either poorly replenished or a complete mess.

? It's more like a warehouse than a supermarket these days, with lots of products stacked high and wide.

? It's completely uninspiring with the majority of comms only communicating low prices and/or the associated Supermarket loyalty schemes.

? Store layouts aren’t fit for purpose, with no natural flow to how we might actually want to shop.?

? And most importantly a complete scarcity of actual employees in-store – particularly anyone who may be available to assist.

Now I’m not saying that Supermarkets need to benchmark against the likes of Apple or Dyson for in-store experience but certainly an enhanced ‘bread and butter’ experience that might thinly suggest that Supermarkets care about their customers beyond ‘like for like’ sales, volume and value growth, profit, and shareholder value!

Supermarkets are outdated.

They are built for operational needs and not for how people shop.

Why would I possibly want three different locations to buy pizza in one store or be thinking about buying Monster Energy drinks while in the frozen aisle. Supermarkets aren’t intuitive or instinctive – they are as robotic as the self-service counters lining the front of stores (which by the way always requires you to wait for a human and are therefore no faster than regular check outs).

Supermarkets who want to succeed, based on improving ‘human’ metrics as well as financial metrics, should look to reinvent retail in a way that removes the burden placed on the consumers.

As in help them navigate the shopper journey with the least amount of friction (make it super easy for them to complete the shopping 'list' without the 10,000 steps or realisation of forgetting something only once they get home), offer help and support from real people throughout the store (who possibly care about good service), upsell to them at the appropriate times (not all the time at 100 mph), acknowledge that you value their custom (it's not only price that matters) and make the in-store experience way more inspiring (think less about long term and way more on short term when thinking about the marketing budget). And I truly believe it's really important to take pride in how you present yourself at all times.

And guess what, those that enhance the 'bread and butter' experience will see an increase in average basket spend but also possibly positive sentiments, loyalty and advocacy metric too.

(I’ll expand on this 'rant' in the November edition of The Consumer Eye)