The supermarket industry isn't too much different from many other enterprises in that tradition plays a big part in how things get done.
But what if certain supermarket traditions concerning merchandising and service were shown to be useless, or even counterproductive, under the harsh light of reality? The answer, of course, is that any practice shown to be no good should be changed. But the real problem is in figuring out the difference between what works and what doesn't.
New technology can help a lot in the quest for separating good from bad, as is being discovered at Marsh Supermarkets. There, a single-store project aimed at finding out how shoppers really shop is suggesting some answers. At the store, a shopper-tracking system has been following the movements of shoppers through the store for several months by means of infrared transmitters on 50 shopping carts and four hand-held baskets at the store. Receivers in the store's ceiling read the infrared output from each moving target, making it possible to map in detail how shoppers shop the store.
The beauty of the system is that it's passive and so requires no shopper involvement, nor does it involve store personnel following shoppers around. The system provides pure and unfiltered data that needs only clever interpretation to yield useful results. One of the more interesting, if preliminary, results from the experiment's early days puts under challenge the industry's tradition of putting hot specials on end-aisle displays. As Mark Heckman, Marsh's director of market research, told SN Productivity reporter Denise Zimmerman, Marsh has found that an end-aisle display of promotional soft drinks might, in a way, work too well because 55% of shoppers who bought from the promotional display never entered the adjacent beverage aisle.
As Mark says in the news article on Page 17, "You have to ask yourself, 'What are we creating in our stores?' Are we creating an environment where people are trained to buy sale items off the ends? If they are trained in that manner, what are we losing by not sending them down the aisle to get the product?"
That's a very fine question because it may well be that the shopper who grabs promotional products off the endcap is the same shopper who would buy more beverage items if exposed to the full product range a tour of the beverage aisle would afford.
Mark points out that no final conclusion should be drawn yet because a similar experiment with promotional paper goods failed to produce similar shopping results. No doubt conclusions will become clearer as the shopper-tracking project goes forward.
But there can be no question that it already pays to think about traditional practices to be sure they make good sense. The idea of thinking about traditional practices brings to mind results of a consumer-attitudes survey published in the May 2 issue of SN. Shoppers surveyed were asked to rate several aspects of merchandising, service and so on to see how they rank when it comes to selecting a shopping destination.
That survey disclosed that another industry tradition -- weekly specials -- may not be as powerful a traffic draw as is assumed: Just 8.4% of shoppers rated weekly specials as most important in selecting a shopping venue. Other traditions that are usually considered quite important didn't fare too well either in the context of prime reasons shoppers select a supermarket: Large selection was chosen by just 11.6%. Even fast checkout drew just 14.3%. This, of course, in no way suggests that weekly specials or broad selection or fast checkouts aren't important. It does say that they aren't paramount all by themselves. And it says it's probably a mistake to pin a chain's whole reputation on one of those low-ranking traditions.
By the way, what did rank as very important considerations in the race to establish a store as a favored shopping destination were everyday-low-price strategies (selected by 24.2%) and convenient location (21.2%). The latter selection confirms that traditional thinking can certainly be rooted in fact.
The trick is in separating good and useful traditions from what reality shows to be little more than strange practices. And it looks as though the industry is learning how to perform that trick.
