What's In-Store: March Update
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Hello, and welcome to our March newsletter.
Read on below for February’s interesting things, including 72% of US shoppers visiting Walmart, new Protein Doritos, and a robot dog climbing your stairs to deliver your dinner.
We’re building up to our event, VST “What’s In-Store” hosted in Manchester, UK on 23rd April. You can sign up here.
As always, hit reply - we’d love to hear what category challenges you’re navigating.
February’s Interesting Things
- Diageo’s Customer Experience Commitment - New Diageo CEO, Dave Lewis, had his first earnings call in February and there was a lot to like. His focus on customer experience (and not just leaving it to the retailers) will have partnership conversations opening up across the off-trade. The most striking stat - 60% of Diageo’s customer orders are still entered manually. Whilst many in the industry are starting to see the benefits of AI transformation, there are still a lot of basics that need to be done by harnessing technology.
- Walmart’s Record Grocery Penetration - dunnhumby’s latest Consumer Trends Tracker posted a number of interesting factors amongst US shoppers. People feel squeezed and many are changing their habits. Most interestingly, 72% of US shoppers have shopped in a Walmart this year - a rise of 6%.
- Everything Must Have Protein - The protein train continues with the latest launch - Doritos. Interested in following this as the health trend starts to blend into the less healthy categories. Does this go in snacks, or with the gym-goers health / wellness protein-enhanced products? I’ll be on the hunt!
- Robot Dog Delivery - In the UK, food delivery service Just Eat launched robot dog delivery service. Gimmick or actually interesting? Unlike previous robot delivery services, the robo-dogs can tackle a robot’s biggest nemeses - stairs, closed gates, and actual-real-life-dogs™.
- Category Management Association Event Summary - We attended the annual CMA | SIMA Elevate conference. A big focus on planograms, space, and virtual store testing. There was a lot of AI talk, and we’re starting to see some practical applications, particularly in the use of LLMs for data analysis. For a quick summary of what was covered, see below.
VST “What’s In-Store” Event - Manchester, UK - 23rd April
We’re running our next “What’s In-Store” event at The People’s History Museum in Manchester, UK on 23rd April. If you’re working on range reviews, planogram decisions, or trying to work out how AI actually fits into category management and insights, this event is for you. Spots are limited, so please sign up here.
8 Key Shelf Merchandising Principles
Eye level is not always buy level. Our studies with >100,000 shoppers across the globe last year showed that sometimes moving to eye level can even harm your brand.
Testing across different categories, shelf layouts, and countries gave us a view of the wider principles of how to get noticed and picked up at-shelf.
Read the full merchandising principles here:
https://app-na1.hubspotdocuments.com/documents/6175801/view/1624718756?accessId=48ee52
How Shoppers Make Pet Care Decisions (and what it means for CPG strategy)
Pet Care is one of the most important categories to get right in-store. As a retailer, if you don’t get your Pet offering right, you risk losing an entire basket as shoppers abandon their trip.
So much so, that Pet Food is the most purposeful trip for shoppers. It is the most planned purchase across the grocery categories, whilst still leaving ~45% of shoppers influenceable at-shelf. The tension between planned vs influence-able is where brands win or lose.
We delved deeper into Pet Care as an extreme category as an example of what other categories could do to follow it. Read all about it here.
What category challenge is keeping you busy this month? Hit reply - I read everything!
