A truly shopper-centric 2015: Retailers create personalized food portals

2015 will be the year that true shopper-centricity finally moves from concept to reality. How?

A few leading food retailers will succeed in combining the one-on-one capability of loyalty marketing programs with the 24/7 functionality of mobile apps to create personalized food portals.

Customers will use the portals to customize food shopping around their unique combination of needs and preferences – time, nutrition, budget constraints, etc. – enabling them to manage their purchasing more confidently. And, the portals will make it easier to organize shopping around individual lifestyles, from the super-organized to the flexible and spontaneous, to those who must respond to demanding and changing schedules.

Successful personalized food portals will offer some essential elements:
• Routine replenishment capabilities and options, so that households will never have to run out of items that they purchase regularly, and so they can take advantage of quantity discounts if they wish. These may include specialty items as well as those typically stocked in-store.
• The capability to obtain long-tail, special-order items that may not be typically found in the store. The majority of online grocery shopping missions involve searching for specialty items.
• Suggestion engines that deliver the fun of discovering new food products. Predictive analytics will cull through thousands of new items coming to market and embed them in meal preparation ideas tailored to the individual or household. (Many shoppers want new ideas, but don’t have the time to do the search.)

A win-win

Customers of these retailers will find that the personalized food portals allow them to “do more of what they want to do” without having to spend the extra time and effort that would take. As a result, they will find it advantageous to concentrate more of their food purchases with that retailer because now they:
• Get more of what they want from just a single source.
• Do more of what’s really important to them in less time.
• Have more confidence and less stress about caring for their households.