Category Archives: shopper

Customers want better promotions

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The Grocer and the press are giving a lot of coverage to the importance customers give to clear pricing and quality offers. What can retailers do to increase shopper trust in their promotions? The purpose of any in-store promotion is ultimately to sell more products but promotions also play a key role in attracting customers to the store and encouraging them to keep coming back for more. However, to get all three benefits from a promotion shoppers have to be able to easily understand the promotion Read more [...]

How Amazon gets customer reviews

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Customer reviews are one of the main reasons why shoppers go to Amazon. So how does Amazon get so many customers to write those reviews? Getting the first customer review on any product is difficult. Most shoppers have a reluctance to be the first to write anything and those that do often write a negative comment due to a bad experience with the product.  This has been the experience of many retailers when they started customer review programmes and caused some to either drop the idea or in Read more [...]

Own label products can make shoppers go elsewhere

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Own label products can be good for retailers by increasing profits and good for customers by reducing prices. But, retailers can pay a heavy price if they attempt to mislead shoppers. Which? discovered that 20% of members in their recent survey have bought what they thought was a big brand product only to discover that it was a supermarkets own brand that looked similar. As a result 30% felt misled and 38% were annoyed. These shoppers have now lost trust in their retailers which will change how Read more [...]

Retailers – show some love this Valentine’s Day

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Valentine’s Day seems to divide the public – is it an over-commercialised excuse to make consumers spend (or fear the consequences) or a day to show a loved one that you care? However you feel about the day of romance, a clear theme is the element of surprise. A card from a secret admirer, with just a hint of who might have sent it. A bunch of flowers delivered to the office. Retailers - why not add the element of surprise to this day? Surprising your customers is one way to ensure they Read more [...]

Amazon and showrooming

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Amazon is becoming the source of product information used before shoppers actually buy in stores. The much talked about showrooming threat that most shoppers would go into stores to look at products and then order them on their mobile from Amazon, while in the store, has not come to pass. Certainly some shoppers use Amazon in store to gain more detailed product information but most end up actually buying in from the store. It could even be that the provision of product information in stores from Read more [...]

Shelf edge is critical for brands

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Brands are starting to pay much more attention to the messages that they give to shoppers at the shelf edge. One example is from Tim Cofer, President of Europe at Mondelez, the owners of Cadbury's and other snack brands. Tim told Marketing Week  "If we are not absolutely brilliant at the point of sale then we will not win."  Other brands are also putting a much stronger focus on the shelf edge and a number of retailers are talking to us about their own brand products too. Tim summed up the Read more [...]

Reasons to buy at the shelf edge

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Why do lots of shoppers walk out of electrical and electronics stores without buying anything and what can you do about it? Most of us don't buy electrical and electronic products that often and therefore few of us are experts on assessing all of the options available. This makes having enough confidence to believe that we are purchasing the best product for our needs quite difficult. Sometimes it's so difficult that it puts shoppers off making a purchase at all and a sale is lost. What about Read more [...]

Showrooming

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There has been a lot of discussion about the problem of showrooming but really it's an opportunity for bricks and mortar retailers. Showrooming is where a shopper goes into a store to get expert advice and product information but then goes to an online competitor to buy the product at a lower price. Very frustrating for stores and typically most common with electrical and technology products. How to respond? Retailers have used various techniques to limit damage to sales. It seems crazy Read more [...]

Retail is detail

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Tesco's Chief Executive, Philip Clarke, emphasised in his strategy for putting Tesco UK back on track that "retail is detail".  I'm sure that we all agree with him. The challenge for Tesco, and most other retailers, is that shoppers have increasingly high expectations about their shopping experience. They have a much lower tolerance of long checkout queues, missing price tickets, misleading promotions and poor customer service.  Not only has the base line risen but it keeps rising. For Read more [...]

The case for Smarter promotions

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It wasn't that long ago when shoppers got quite excited to see a product on the shelf with 10% off. Of course shoppers soon got used to 10% off promotions and stores had to offer 15% or 20% price cuts.  In what seemed like no time at all 20% became the minimum price cut to have an impact and 25%, 40% and 50% are frequently seen today in many different product categories. Shoppers are smart As the discount offers increased shopper began to wonder how stores could afford to be so generous.  Some Read more [...]