Why Are Grocery Stores So Dull?

Why are grocery stores so dull?I’ve been spending a lot of time in grocery stores recently. Over the last six months I’ve visited supermarkets and hypermarkets in two continents and in seven different countries.  You’d think that in such a diverse world, with so many cultural differences, that our grocery stores would reflect our diversity and differences, wouldn’t you?

And yet when I compare grocery stores in Spain and Singapore, Udine and Udon Thani, Dublin and Driotwich I’m often faced with exactly the same picture: aisle after aisle of uniformly presented shelves full of evenly stacked and ubiquitous products. The similarity between the places we shop in is striking and at the same time it’s stultifying!

Do  grocery stores have to be so dull?

On a recent trip to Ireland, I got to spend some time with Ken Hughes from Glacier Consulting, and it was that meeting that got me thinking about this. Ken is a behavioral economist, which means he’s interested in how our behaviors influence the economic choices we make. He applies this expertise when looking at the way we shop. He has watched shoppers, measured their brain waves, even tracked the speed at which trolleys are pushed through stores and all of his research leads to a singular conclusion – when we shop, we do so on auto-pilot.

Studies time and again bear this out; as grocery shoppers we pay little attention to our environment, only seeking out the products we actually want in a category most of the time. Ken likens this to using the grocery store as an extension to our pantries – we just reach into stores and grab what we want, without really thinking about it.  So of course we find shopping dull – for many of us it’s dead time.

But does the in-store environment of grocery stores we shop in need to be dull?

Dull environments sustain habits

Ironically, a dull environment may be exactly what we need. A dull environment may not be sexy but it is extremely predictable.  Predictability supports habits.

We actually buy a relatively limited range of grocery products every year and we tend to buy from portfolios of brands we trust – in effect many of us buy grocery products habitually. Many shoppers habitually go to the same store every week for their groceries and many of us will be familiar with the sensation when go shopping that we can’t really remember where we’ve been in the store and how our carts managed to get so full. The conclusion that shopping is habitual for many people is therefore unavoidable.

Retailers and manufacturers like this. For good reasons: it helps them plan; predictable habits support accurate forecasting which leads to effective inventory, logistics and production planning, all of which keeps costs down.

So dull, predictable environments are good for manufacturers and retailers, right? Well, no!

In order to grow, habits need to change

You don’t have to be a student of physics to have heard Einstein’s definition of insanity: “Doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.” This should be invoked often in the world of consumer goods marketing, because whilst the industry craves predictability, it needs growth to thrive. Unfortunately, the only way to grow is to encourage shoppers’ behavior to change, either by getting people who don’t buy to buy or buy getting those who do buy, to buy more, more often.

To do this, shopping environments need to be dynamic.

Creating a dynamic shopping environment

One of the coolest things about online retail environments is they have the potential to be in permanent flux. As my needs change and develop, Amazon’s offer (for instance) changes to reflect my changing behavior. Bricks and mortar stores are not so flexible, so creating a dynamic in-store environment  of grocery stores is a much bigger ask. It requires a much higher level of collaboration between manufacturers and retailers to be successful. Together they need to:

  1. Identify the shopper behavior they want – do manufacturers and retailers want shoppers to trade-up, buy in greater volumes, join the category for the first time or (yes) stick to what they’ve always done?
  2. Ensure that the store can deliver – store operators (and their suppliers) need to be honest about what can be achieved in a grocery outlet. Will shoppers notice the new bigger idea? Are they prepared to take the extra time to learn about the category? Will they be upset if you mess with their habits?
  3. Define what needs to happen to change behavior – behaviors change as a result of stimuli – if you provide the right stimuli, behaviors will change. So together, retailers and manufacturers need to learn what stimuli really work.
  4. Make change a habit – shoppers will adapt to changes in retail environments quickly, so what was once an innovation rapidly becomes wall-paper and new habits get formed. To continue growing, marketers and merchants have to consistently innovate.

At engage we’ve made it our mission to help consumer goods companies to improve their engagement with consumers, shoppers and retail customers. If you are facing a growth challenge, contact us, to learn how we can help.

Is Retail Dead?

I was recently invited to speak to a group of entrepreneurs in Singapore, and searching for a topic that might be of more general interest, I decided to ask the question of whether retail is dead? I broke my presentation into three parts: the case against retail; the case for retail; and the implications of the new reality of retail – you can access the slides here.

Why traditional retail might be dead

Given the massive volume of words written weekly on the subject of digital, e-commerce and mobile, you could easily be forgiven for thinking that the blogosphere has decided that bricks and mortar retail is dead. Here in Asia there is loads of evidence suggesting we love online shopping.  Asians want to shop online – a recent survey by Nielsen suggested that intent to shop online in the next three months ran at over 30% for apparel and travel and more than 25% intended to buy phones, food and beauty products online in the near future. In China, T-Malls’ recent Singles Day promotion overwhelmed couriers all over the country as more than US$3 billion dollars of sales were recorded in a single day.

Given the massive volume of words written weekly on the subject of digital, e-commerce and mobile, you could easily be forgiven for thinking that the blogosphere has decided that bricks and mortar retail is dead. Here in Asia there is loads of evidence suggesting we love online shopping.  Asians want to shop online – a recent survey by Nielsen suggested that intent to shop online in the next three months ran at over 30% for apparel and travel and more than 25% intended to buy phones, food and beauty products online in the near future. In China, T-Malls’ recent Singles Day promotion overwhelmed couriers all over the country as more than US$3 billion dollars of sales were recorded in a single day.

Is Retail Dead

With 44% of the world’s internet-connected population, and with the world’s largest and fastest growing middle class population, there’s no doubt that more and more Asians will shop online in the coming years. This is reshaping the Asian retail landscape, especially in China where brands like T-Mall, Yihaodian and 360Buy are vacuuming up larger shares of the market (and complicating brands’ e-retail strategies!). At a more micro-level opening an online retail site today is practically free, so more and more sole traders are moving to supply products this way. There is no doubt that this will hurt regular retailers – the demise of many retailers in US and Europe has proven this to an extent.

So IS retail as we know it dead?

You had better hope not! Retail is probably the biggest business on the planet; consider the following:

  • There are probably well over 65 million shops in the world
  • It is estimated that retail sales account for nearly 20% of global GDP
  • The world’s biggest retailers account for fully 7% of the total retail sales and have more than doubled in size in the last decade
  • Retail is the world’s largest private sector employer – Wal-Mart alone is the world’s 3rd largest employer after the US department of defense and China’s PLA and more than 3 million Americans are employed in independent retail alone.

It’s a stretch therefore to right-off this industry as being dead; especially when much shopping is done in physical stores. Forrester (the research company) reckon that 90% of all retail sales in the US are in regular stores and a tiny proportion of the world’s grocery sales are made online. In actual fact we love shopping in stores; here in Asia the volume of traffic in malls, hypermarkets and traditional wet markets is consistently high. In Asia grocery shopping online is tiny: a recent survey published by Bergent suggests that just 1% of Korean and Singaporean housewives shop for groceries online and that none do in Japan, Hong Kong or India.

So no, retail is not dead. But, it has changed!

A different way to shop

The biggest impact of the internet revolution on retailing is not so much where we shop but how we shop. It used to be possible to clearly define the aspects of the marketing mix that influence us as consumers of a product and those that affect our behavior as shoppers. Traditionally the former happened outside the shopping environment. But today, the use of connected devices runs through almost every aspect of our lives. This exposes us to millions of targeted messages that form and influence what we want to concern and how we will buy almost concurrently. Effectively we are always shopping!

The likely reality is that multichannel retail will become much more normal – a true combination of clicks and bricks. Some savvy retailers have already adopted this model: Debenhams, the UK-based department store has been tremendously successful in blending  a compelling in-store offer with an online one, and online players like Ebay have begun to capitalize on the love of retail space by using pop-up stores.

A new marketing model

With so many changes afoot, manufacturers could be caught napping and that could have some very negative impacts. This requires a change in the way we think about marketing. Today, marketers who have a superior understanding of the segments of consumers and the shoppers they are chasing get ahead of their competition. So these marketers have moved away from a singular focus on the consumer and now consider a more complete view of the world.

We call this broader view ‘Total Marketing’. This model looks at the relationships between consumers, shoppers and retailers to define the best way of driving growth efficiently. Our new book The Shopper Marketing Revolution explains why this new model is so important, introduces the key concepts that underpin it and provides a field guide to individuals who want to apply it. You can buy the The Shopper Marketing Revolution at Amazon  now.

Hunting For Retail Innovation In Barcelona

Hunting-for-Retail-Innovation-in-Barcelona-image

I recently returned from a relatively rare business trip to Barcelona, Spain. Excited to be back in the market after a few years, I persuaded my client to take me on a tour of nearby stores. Predictably, of course Carrefour was on the list of stores we would go to, but so were Eroski’s Spanish subsidiary Caprabo and Spain’s own Mercadona. [Read more…]

How To Ruin A Brand

If, like me, you’ve been following the backlash against comments by Abercrombie and Fitch’s CEO Mike Jeffries, you’ll have seen how in today’s connected world that bad PR can have a huge impact on a brand. I have to admit that I have little sympathy for Mr. Jeffries and no affinity to the A&F brand at all but I do think that anyone who wants to learn exactly how to ruin a brand can learn a lot from what has happened. [Read more…]

The Future Of Grocery Shopping


Ten years ago, if you had a shop selling books, airline tickets, music and video and consumer electronics, you probably weren’t too bothered by e-commerce. Sales on the internet were a marginal thing; there was little evidence to suggest the mass market was going online. Today if you still own a shop in these areas you are either highly specialized or going out of business. Nobody can argue that, in these categories, online shopping has not radically changed the retail landscape. Today this is far from being true in grocery retail. So should CPG marketers worry that the future of grocery shopping might be radically different to what we have become accustomed to today? [Read more…]