___________________________________________________________________________ At a Glance
Love it or hate it, there is no way around grocery
shopping. Accenture Director Sally Bean says grocery shopping in the future
will be dramatically different to the current experience.
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New Consumer Criteria Creates
Opportunities
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Posted: September 11, 2003   In western society, consumers are beginning to use a new
set of criteria to evaluate the richness of their lives. Far from trying to
satisfy these criteria in only certain domains of their lives, they want their
lifestyles, even their grocery shopping, to reflect their personal choices and
preferences.
Today's grocery retailer does not address these enhanced
desires of their customers and, in many cases, is unaware they exist. However,
to be able to succeed in tomorrow's competitive markets, they will need to
create store environments and shopping experiences that cater for their
consumers' requirements.
Traditionally, consumers judged their shopping experiences
on a set of basic functional needs: quality, price, variety, convenience and
value for money. The specific consumer demographics determining which of the
five are more important. The consumer of today and tomorrow, however, has new
criteria built on top of the traditional ones. They want their in-store
experience to enhance their lives in some way—either through a sense of
enjoyment, self-development, purpose or even a sense of belonging.
New Consumer Criteria Creates OpportunitiesMore attention is being paid to food
as a result of scares like Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy (BSE) or Mad Cow
Disease and genetically modified food worries. Additionally, food, cooking and
shopping are becoming central to social interaction for both men and
women—whether through eating out with friends, cooking with friends and family,
or meeting friends and family at shops or shopping centres.
Enlarge Figure 1
According to research conducted by Accenture, consumers are
increasingly looking to food, cooking and shopping to enrich their lives. They
will evaluate their experiences with food, cooking and shopping in terms of how
they contribute to making their lives more fun, enhancing their feelings of
authenticity, supporting their social interaction, developing their sense of
well-being and their spirituality, as well as providing opportunities for
learning and for optimising their use of time.
Grocers are in an ideal position to address the needs of
consumers in all of these areas, but in reality they currently only address the
functional levels and focus on food distribution. The research indicates that
there are five opportunity areas that, if introduced correctly, will make the
shopping experience a more rewarding one.
- Household assistant. Grocers can ease
consumers’ everyday burdens and integrate themselves into the household
management with some advice and assistance. Examples include offering tips on
what to make for dinner, or providing shopping lists based on previous shopping
outings in order to ease the burden on busy customers while creating consumer
loyalty for the grocer.
- High involvement. Some purchases are
low-involvement items that are bought regularly and require little thought.
Providing people with shopping lists on their PDAs (personal digital
assistants) or cell phones to order their low-involvement goods (washing powder
etc.). Grocers could then allow for less space in the store for these items,
and rather provide a facility to pick these items from a store stockroom and
have them packed and ready for the consumer at the till. Shoppers can then
spend more time with things that interest them and the store will have the
space and time to more effectively present high involvement items. The store
can influence sales by creating a compelling in-store experience for the
purchase of these items. Courses and demonstrations around items in the
fresh-food section could be provided, for example.
- Community member. A sense of fulfilment
in a social context can be provided to customers when the stores undertake
activities that make them an integral part of public life. Clothing or food
schemes for the needy are an example of community action. Singles shopping
night could be another.
- Local market. Creating a market will
demonstrate the grocer’s commitment to providing fresh, healthy goods and
assure buyers of quality. It also provides another form of social interaction,
creates more loyalty to the store and makes the experience more enjoyable for
customers.
- Operational effectiveness. Before
grocers can assume the roles in the areas described above, they first need to
get the basics right and gain consumers’ confidence and trust. Without it, none
of the value-added benefits would matter. Customers would regard them with a
mixture of mistrust and cynicism. These are things like having high levels of
product availability, making sure stores are clean and tidy and ensuring that
customers don’t need to stand in queues for long.
Enlarge Figure 2
These changes are not pie-in-the-sky dreams. They are
already happening in a small number of stores around the world and it’s only a
matter of time before they are widely spread in mainstream grocery stores.
There is no one solution for every store however. Each community has specific
needs and each store will have to identify what its customers’ value and
deliver a service according to those values.
The best way to start the transformation of the old grocery
store is to simply take small steps at regular intervals. The success or
failure of each will enable management to refine its direction and design a
store around its customers. This will take consumers on an exciting journey of
change—an attractive prospect in itself—into the new age of shopping.
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