Making shopping super-easy

Masses of shopping trolleys at Canal Walk Shopping Mall.... ready for the rush
Photo owned by DanieVDM (cc)

The supermarket wars are upon us. Superquinn are shouting from the rafters about their return to 70′s prices and how we all end up buying that rubber dingy from a German discount supermarket. Dunnes are keen to give us 20% off in niche parts of our basket on their Clubcard scheme and Tesco are reminding us that every little does indeed help.

So, what kind of ideas could Supermarket X put into play to in a very tight market to attract us Recession-wary customers.

Happy Hours
Mondays and Tuesdays can be the slowest footfall days of the week in supermarket life. How about creating a hour or so of extra discounted selling? Perhaps mid-morning. Say from 10:30 to 11:30. That’s a prime slot of possible mammy shopping time too, with kids at school.

During this time, the further reductions on selected items could be offered for purchases paid for during this period. Extra messages informing customers of the offers and the time left could be announced by tannoy. That would definitely get interest going.

Voucher Receipting
One of the smartest receipt tricks is printing vouchers on the back of them. Want to discourage the flow of unnecessary returns? Make the customer want to rip up the receipt. Yeah, I kid.

What I can’t understand is why major retailers ignore the opportunity of distributing vouchers on each receipt? Ignore those flat dry-cleaning-esque vouchers of yore, now. Stay with me.

All the value clubs seem to want to do is take the approach of opening another line of direct marketing in club mailshots. The expensive sort. You know, with colour printing and lots of photos. What’s the first thing that customer do? Fiddle for the vouchers.

Wouldn’t be a lot more cost effective for stores to print vouchers at the bottom of receipts? Vouchers would blurbs and barcodes on the bottom of the receipts. Just In Time printing to the rear of a receipt would be costly. For the sake of a couple of inches at the bottom of a receipt, massive conglomerates could drastically cut the spend on direct marketing.

Taking this a step further, club members might like to choose to allow their purchases to be data-mined so that targeted vouchering can be created at each visit. Of course, this would be an opt-in for club members, but it might be paletable to customers that want more relevant discounts.

Easy to reach and see

Just because supermarkets can pile them high doesn’t mean they ought to. The average mammy should be able to reach the top shelf. Take the average height of an Irish woman at about 5’5″ with a window of 2″ above and below. That model height should be able to comfortably reach the top shelf in an aisle.

Cans, jars and glass bottles on the top shelf are the devil. Course, one can’t avoid them in the off-licence section. Oh and stacking of jars and cans on the said top shelf is * insane *. Got a deathwish, reach for that jar of carrots.

Softer lighting in a supermarket helps. It makes the place seem less like a homogen-market and more like a place I want to shop. Cost effective too, if the supermarket uses energy-efficient lighting.

Simplify and target

Like every other business out there, supermarkets need to look at their core activities and see where there are opportunities to simplify and target their efforts to nab custom. There’s definitely going to be consolidation in the supermarket sector in the next couple of years and, like Lord of the Flies, the fittest will survive.

January 21st, 2009 at 3:06 pm • Filed in Business



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