Supermarkets agreement to prices and discounts code – a brand responsibility?

By the time legislation catches up with a problem, the damage has already been done. Thus, having made significant progress in building consumer trust in private label and store ‘brand’, retailers forget that branding is really a guarantee that every time the tin is opened, its contents are the same or better than the consumer’s previous experience.

Having come so far, retailers have progressively undermined that trust by manipulation of prices and discounts to the disadvantage of the regular shopper – ‘secure’ in the knowledge that they have adhered to the letter rather than the spirit of the law…

It will be a pity if the new code is allowed to simply become a more demanding set of parameters for further manipulation.

Hopefully, good retailers will see a major opportunity for real differentiation – scope to become the champion of the people by representing transparent value via clear pricing and easy comparison, while competitors allow shoppers’ creeping suspicion to dilute their hard-won brand equity…

However, the real issue for brand owners has to be the realisation that it is their responsibility, rather than that of the retailer, to be the custodian of brand equity at point of purchase.

Brand owners are busy applying all the principles of shopper marketing in the aisle at incremental expense. A pity to allow all gains to be sacrificed at the checkout.

It is vital to ensure that a link is maintained with brand consumers in order that perceived value is exceeded by actual performance by helping shoppers to count and appreciate real value

Making the numbers add up would help…

Top five scams impacting online xmas shoppers

According to an online shopping survey of 1,005 people commissioned by software security vendor, Kaspersky Lab, 76 per cent of participants will be purchasing Christmas gifts online this year, and each of these is potentially vulnerable to credit card theft and other scams during the holiday season.

Top five holiday scams:

1. Christmas eCards: links to eCards may contain malware
2. Parcel delivery notifications: fake delivery notification emails may infect computers
3. Fake order confirmations: fake order confirmation emails causing shoppers to think someone ordered a product under their name
4. Holiday screen savers: Holiday-themed screen saver downloads can contain malware
5. Social media malware: include fake Facebook Christmas competitions, video links with malware, and Twitter viruses

Some tips available here

Managing online trust
Give the fragility of many shoppers confidence in online purchasing, it is vital that suppliers and retailers build consumer education and xx into their online communication. The Catch 22 is that such education needs pitching in ways that reassure rather than further de-stabilise nervous shoppers.

However, the real solution has to be strong online branding.
If in any doubt, think what Amazon has achieved by distilling all consumer reluctance into          1-Click shopping… 

Amazon-the-grocer moves from 22,000 to 150,000 products since July 2010

With a sevenfold increase in the groceries it offers online in barely two years, ‘having completely met expectations and growing great’, in a flatline market, Amazon has to be growing at the expense of traditional grocers. Whilst some big-lunged suppliers and retailers may decide to await the outcome of possible government moves ref alleged tax issues, proactive suppliers will take a positive approach and follow the market…..

Managing Amazon-the-grocer
This means accepting the fact that Amazon are going to go all the way with food, offering the simplicity of 1-click ordering, pick-up/drop-off convenience on the back of a food range that knows no limits, and no-quibble returns, all tailored in terms of consumer tell-your-friend delight.

It also means staffing Amazon with NAMpower matched to potential, rather than history, of a quality that can scope out and deliver an omni-channel strategy that integrates with all other ways of buying your products, seamlessly…using the Amazon strategy as a template for all other retail.

How to recognise this Amazing NAM?
Big-thinking question:  ask candidates how Amazon might finesse its home delivery within the M25…
Disqualifying hint: In terms of ways and means, given Amazon’s growth record and prospects, how long do you think it would take them to raise the £386m it would take to buy Ocado at today’s share price?

Pit-stop perfection: Formula 1 teams reveal their split-second technology

pic: sportinglife.aol.co.uk

Lack of time to have a haircut or change a set of tyres can be indicators that 24/7 NAMs need to review their time-management skills.

With this weekend's Grand Prix in Brazil marking the climax of the Formula 1 season, there may be lessons to learn from how top Marussia and McLaren drivers use technology to try to shave fractions of a second off a trip to the pits.

BBC News went behind the scenes with the two teams to learn how it simply takes 4-men per tyre and a heap of state-of-art technology to make a difference…Full 3.23 minute video here.

Incidentally, for those NAMs that like a target, McLaren recorded the world's fastest Formula 1 pit stop during the German Grand Prix in July this year, with a stationary time of 2.31 seconds, while they changed Jenson Button's tyres.

So, with the right attitude and tools, and a slightly faster car, it can well be possible to fit in that last-minute dash to the buyer’s waiting-room queue, with every hair cut to perfection… 

Have a full 172,800-second weekend, from the NamNews team!

Taking space-management into the warehouse - a networking aid for NAMs?

           
Given that a NAM’s effectiveness increasingly depends upon multifunctional motivation, and with warehousing efficiency a key cost in the pricing equation, then any insight into optimising warehouse space has to count. This is why the fact that Mini Bendi have scooped the Innovation Award at Asda’s annual Store Proposition award ceremony is closer to the NAM role than you think.

The Asda view
Simon Grass, Asda Back of House Development Manager commented: “The Mini Bendi allows us to significantly drive the use of the cube in our back of house areas as it can work in the narrow aisle format and maximise the usable height available, but due to its way of working, that allows us to have pedestrian pick within the same area permitting the stores to drop and fill effectively. This supports the reduction in the building footprint and thus improves the building’s selling efficiency as we can either build a smaller store or increase the selling sq ft. It also allows us to lower the height of the building as we can now store as many pallets above ‘pedestrian pick’ in narrow aisles, as we could in the reach truck aisles at height, which is especially welcomed by the local planning authorities in certain areas of the country.”

A networking opportunity?
In a place where space is money, the Mini Bendi, which saves warehouse space, increases shop floor selling space and frees up congestion in the pedestrian pick area, offers NAMs a way of opening a productive networking dialogue with both colleagues and ‘back-of-store’ customer contacts.

Why not pass a link to relevant contacts and see it make a difference?

'3D tape measure' for online shoppers, a pointer for NAMs?

Scientists from Surrey University and design experts from the London College of Fashion are developing a programme which can take precise waist, hip, chest and other measurements from camera images.
Using the person's height as a starting point, the software will be able to build up a 3D image and estimate their size at various different points on the body, based on their overall proportions.

Why it matters...
The result will be a more accurate sizing guide than systems based on waist size or a "small/medium/large" scale, which rely on limited measurements and the buyer's perception of their own body size. Instead, the programme will use the exact measurements of each individual garment to predict which size will be the best fit, avoiding shopper tendency to order several sizes of the same garment, just-in-case…

Ultimate in shopper engagement 
For fmcg NAMs, the issue is not how much extra clothes it sells, but the degree of competition it represents to ‘regular’ fmcg in terms of shopper engagement (coupons, leaflets, competitions, pale by comparison….).
This advance in meeting online shopper needs really forces fmcg suppliers to find more creative ways of engaging with the shopper, like tying self-measure monitoring to dietary aids/foods, for starters....

Time to encourage your marketing colleagues to re-assess and engage with consumer needs, before retailers add a real difference to private label? 

Bionic Mannequins are Keeping an Eye on Shoppers to Boost Luxury Sales

The EYE SEE mannequin from Almax S.p.A. (Italy) in collaboration with Kee Square makes it possible to observe who is attracted by store windows and visual displays using facial recognition software. The software, powered by IBM, uses a camera embedded in one eye that feeds data into facial-recognition software like that used by police. It can track age range, gender, race, number of people and dwell time.

Results
The €4,000 ($5,072) device has spurred shops to adjust window displays, store layouts and promotions to keep consumers walking in the door and spending.

According to Bloomberg, Benneton US are among five retailers currently trialling the mannequin camera.

A step too far?
Like all attempts to monitor shopper behaviour, the innovation raises privacy issues for both staff and shoppers. Staff issues could be managed via loading of all personnel pics into the software and eliminating them from the tracking, hopefully….

However, given that privacy tends to be less of an issue when consumer needs are being met via tailored offerings, like with Amazon’s relevant emails, providing the store can demonstrate reactive use of the insight, then size and quality of basket will deliver the ultimate endorsement.

The letter vs. the spirit of multibuy promotions

Given the media coverage of Which? latest research on ‘misleading’  promotions, the key issue is how the consumer-shopper will react to creeping realisation that no-one can be trusted…

As a person or company works to the edge of ‘right and wrong’ they might acknowledge that whilst their observation of the spirit of the law might be in question, strictly speaking they remained within the letter of the law... In an environment where loyalty to a brand or store is increasingly fragile, spirit and letter become indistinguishable, especially to a savvy consumer, and, as you know we are all becoming savvy consumers...  This means that if a deal even seems wrong, the damage is already done..

The Which? findings
Which? year-long investigation into "misleading" pricing tactics by the major chains indicated that seven out of 10 people prefer straightforward discounts to multibuy offers.

Multibuy deals have become a staple of supermarket promotions in recent years, and now apply to nearly half the goods on offer in a supermarket at any one time. Which? said that of the 115 products that it examined in the first half of this year, 46% of the time they were on multibuy, compared with 35% of the time in the first half of 2011.

Increasing suspicion
But there are signs that consumers have become increasingly disillusioned by the value on offer in supermarket promotions. Around one in 10 products on supermarket shelves increased in price when they went from the previous standard price to the new multibuy price, then decreased again when the promotion ended.

Losing the consumer...
The only real issue for suppliers and retailers is whether, having been ‘mislead’ by a promotion, the shopper associates the deception with the multibuy itself, the  brand involved or the shopkeeper…  In other words, does the shopper dismiss multibuys and revert to ‘straight’ sales, switch to another brand or change stores…

Given the upfront investment in getting the consumer-shopper to this point, it seems a pity to then kick ‘em over to the opposition….