Optimize Brand SKU Assortment by Understanding Supermarket Shopping Missions

People visit the supermarket every day, and they have their own reasons and motivations for each trip. Supermarket trips are purpose driven, and brands have spent millions of pesos to understand these purposes and motivations via Shopping Missions studies. But through the Go Rewards loyalty program and DAVI’s big data and machine learning capabilities, we’ve discovered that there is more nuance to the traditional shopping missions brands are familiar with. Compared to the three traditional missions (Main Stock Up, Top Up, Meal for the Day), DAVI has discovered six distinct missions people take when they visit the supermarket.?

1. Stock Up Shopping Mission

Supermarket shoppers go on a Stock Up mission to buy their household needs in bulk. This isn’t new, but we've discovered 2 distinct clusters within the Stock Up mission:?

Food Haul Stock Up Shopping Mission

The first distinct cluster are those who go on Food Hauls. Among all the missions, Food Haul shoppers have the biggest basket spend and quantity, and those on this mission are buying mostly food products.?

Variety Stock Up Shopping Mission

The second distinct cluster are those who buy in Variety. This mission’s baskets contain an assortment of different categories in bulk.

2. Focused Trip Shopping Mission

The next set of missions belongs to Focused Trip. What was traditionally labelled as just Top Up trips, we discovered that there is a logic and more deliberate purpose to this mission, because there are also 2 more distinct missions under: Home Care focused trip and a Self-Care focused trip.

Home Care Focused Trip Shopping Mission

Home Care mission baskets are skewed towards home care items like laundry and cleaning products.

Self-Care Focused Trip Shopping Mission

Self-Care mission baskets skew towards personal care products like hair, bath and oral care products.

3. Food Trip Shopping Mission

The next 2 distinct missions are centered around Food Trips: those buying items for home-cooked meals, and those going on a snacking trip.??

Home-Cooked Meal Food Trip Shopping Mission

Home-Cooked Meal shopping mission baskets consist of perishable and non-perishable food like chicken, bread and savory snacks.?

Snacking Food Trip Shopping Mission

On the other hand, those on a Snacking shopping mission have baskets that consist mostly of non-perishable or shelf stable food like bread, savory snacks, coffee and chocolate.???

These new missions are clearly distinct from one another because of their different spend and quantity bands. Within each shopping mission, we can also see distinct category trends, with contribution indicating relevance. Understanding this will help brands prioritize and grow share strategically.?

Moreover, because we are able to track when members transact, we see that both stock up trips peak on weekends, home cooked meals are consistent across the week, while Focused Trips & Snacking Trips occur on weekdays.?

In addition to this, we wanted to paint a better picture of who the people performing these missions are. We first used the total base's demographic splits as a baseline, then compared this to each mission to identify the skews and saw that:

Stock Up Mission shoppers are skewed to married females who shop for household maintenance and their families. Those who shop on a Variety mission are part of the upper age bracket.

On the other hand, Focused Trip Mission shoppers are skewed slightly more to unmarried individuals. Those who shop in this mission are generally younger, too.

Lastly, Food Trip Mission shoppers are skewed to single males, within 35-45 years old, with the objective of shopping for occasional food needs.

By understanding the different shopping missions, brands can create harder working SKU assortment or portfolio, making sure that you have the right product offering, relevant to the shopping mission and matching this to the consumption or consumer usage behavior. Send us an email at [email protected] to learn more about how to grow your brand.