At last week's Food Marketing Institute's Midwinter Executive Conference in Boca Raton, Fla., a useful observation was made about outcomes being produced by Efficient Consumer Response activities.
The commentary came from Robert E. Bartels, who told a conference audience that maybe ECR has ended up being a "weaker variant" of what it should have been. With that, he dubbed the initiative "Efficient Cost Reduction." Bob is president of Martin's Super Markets, South Bend, Ind., and FMI chairman. Here's more of what he said in his chairman's remarks to the Midwinter audience: "Today, while we have succeeded in putting ECR on everyone's agenda, we have not yet pursued the full vision of this undertaking.
"What we are trying to practice is a weaker variant, what I would call efficient cost reduction. And even if we can become masters of efficiency, we'll still be searching for strategies to meet the changing demand of those people whose favor is most instrumental to our success, our customers."
Bob's warning is one that has been sounded more and more lately. The essence of the new mantra is that it's now time to see ECR as more than a network of strategies aimed at streamlining backstage distribution logistics. What's needed at this time is to put the "C" for consumer back into ECR. At least so go the current slogans. Actually, when it comes right down to it, customers care nothing at all about logistics. They ask supermarkets basic questions such as "what are you selling, what does it cost and how difficult will this transaction be?"
But, of course, technology plays a big part in answers to just those questions. And, this line of thinking brings up a question for consumers. It's this: If asked to consider it, what benefits would food shoppers like to see technology give them?
To discover the answer to that very question, Supermarket News commissioned a research organization to conduct a nationwide survey of 1,000 supermarket shoppers. Respondents were asked to articulate their opinions on various technology approaches such as front-end scanning, electronic payment options, frequent-shopper programs and shop-at-home services.
To find out how consumers rate these technology-driven solutions, take a look at the news feature on Page 15. The article, written by Senior Section Editor Marc Millstein, shows that the benefit consumers most seek from technology is lower prices. There's little surprise in that opinion, but, as it happens, price lowering is at least one of the possible outcomes of ECR. That's fortuitous since consumers know nothing about ECR.
In any event, here's a summary of what consumers would most like to see out of advanced technology: Lower prices (51%), faster checkout (27%), improved price accuracy (10%), more appealing shopping environment (6%) and safer shopping (4%), among other responses. The mention by about 10% of respondents that they would most like to see improved price accuracy from technological advances raises the troubling specter that the message of scanning's accuracy still isn't getting across.
Indeed, when drilling down into this matter by asking focused questions about confidence levels in scanning accuracy, it was found that a sizable 8% of respondents said they weren't confident at all in scanning accuracy, about 50% said they were no more than somewhat confident in its accuracy, leaving just 42% professing complete confidence in the technology. Clearly, this story of technological success needs to be told better. But what do all the findings about consumer opinions on technology combine to tell us? These opinions are saying that the current industry thinking, which holds that technology must now be returned to the basics of customer needs and services, is right on track. And, it shows that just because ECR or other technology enablers make some efficiency move possible -- such as providing a rationale for trimming numbers of stockkeeping units -- it doesn't follow that customers will necessarily like the outcome.
