Think Flat

Did you know that nearly 30 percent of shoppers around the world wait until they're in the store to decide which brand they will buy ?

Did you know that one in ten shoppers simply change their minds in store and buy a different brand than what they had planned ?

Did you know that almost 20 percent of shoppers will buy from categories they had no intention of buying from before entering the store ?

Did you know that in the United States, almost one in five shoppers leave a product they planned to buy on the shelf and walk away empty-handed ?

Continue reading "Why ShoppingTrip 360 ?" »

Posted by Shashi Shekhar Vempati at 07:26 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The grocery industry didn’t convince the American consumer that maximum return on stimulus checks could be achieved right in the supermarket aisles," says Precima General Manager Brian Ross

He should know for his firm just published a survey of 1,948 consumers to find that while 89% shoppers continue to remain loyal to their neighborhood grocery store of choice, as many as 72 percent said they’ve made fewer trips to buy groceries in the past six months.

The problems for Grocery Retailers however may just be getting worse with what the Minneapolis Star Tribune calls "trading down" by the value conscious shopper who is

Continue reading "Me, Myself and My Shopping" »

Posted by Shashi Shekhar Vempati at 07:25 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

New York City, 5th Ave: 4 to 5 hours
New York City, Soho: 4 hours
New York City, 14th St.: 3.5 hours
Beverly Hills, CA: 30 minutes to 1 hour
Seattle, WA: 3 hours (out of stock)
Knoxville, TN: no line (out of stock)
Honolulu, HI: 20 minutes (out of stock)
Minnetonka, MN: 1 hour (out of stock)
Glendale, WI: 10 to 15 minutes (very little stock)
West Des Moines, IA: no line (very little stock)

If you are wondering what that was all about, the DVICE had this wonderful piece on the lineups for the 3G iPhone from Apple which now, we are reliably told, is out of stock with atleast a 12 day lead time for delivery.

Continue reading "If you stock they will come" »

Posted by Shashi Shekhar Vempati at 07:05 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The City of Orlando it is reported is considering a new Shopping Cart Ordinance.

The city might consider requiring new stores with more than 20 carts to have a cart retention system. Customers of Big Lots, for example, must pay a quarter for a cart. At Wal-Mart, a digitally encoded locking signal prevents shoppers from leaving the parking lot with the cart

Orlando is not the only city complaining about Shopping Carts that show up at the most unlikely places. From Oceanside CA to Victoria Canada Shopping Cart Containment measures seem to be the flavor of the season.

With all this focus on stolen and abandoned Shopping Carts, Retailers maybe thinking containment and perimeter security, but what about the Shopping Cart inside the store.

In last week's blog it was clear that Retailers have very little knowledge of what happens in-store with Shopping Carts as the value conscious shopper walks the aisles.  But change is on the horizon with a few leading edge initiatives like Neilsen's PRISM, BestBuy's tests with Brickstream, Tesco's one-in-front initiative that uses thermal imaging.

But here is the challenge for solutions focused on monitoring in-store shopper traffic.

A survey on Australian shopping habits revealed that shoppers were not only venturing to their local more frequently, but were spending more time browsing in-store.

the average female spends 12 months of her time on Earth in shopping centres hunting bargains and buying everything from potato chips to the latest must-have patent heels. It found that for men shopping was generally a chore. For women, it was a pleasure

So its no longer about driving traffic in to the store and measuring traffic it is about making the browsing a pleasure or less of a chore depending on the shopprer profile.

This is where current technology solutions from cameras to infrared imaging to thermal sensing fall woefully short for they may provide a measure of traffic concentration in a section of a store or the total footfalls through an aisle, but they do not provide any insight into the browsing experience of the Shopping Trip from start to finish.

Without this corral to check out view of a Shopping Trip, any data of in-store traffic is about as insightful in understanding how the female shopaholic browses the store as studying an in-store random walk by a Monkey with a homing device on its collar.

So how can Retailers and Consumer Product Manufacturers gear up to understand the female shopaholic better to make those 12 months of a lifetime of browsing a pleasure ?

What disruptive innovations are out there which can give a corral to check-out, 360 degree view of the Shopping Trip ?

Also see

If you stock they will come ?

Posted by Shashi Shekhar Vempati at 10:16 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

On my way out of the store I couldnt help wonder on the irony. Here I was a regular shopper to the Store, spending close to an hour in the store running up a basket total of about $125 and there was no trace of my presence in the store but for my transaction at the checkout register. Till I walked up to the Store Manager seeking help he had no knowledge of who I was, where I had been in the store and what I was trying to buy. The retracing was useful in more than one way to both of us. I got to pick a couple of alternatives for products that were out of stock while the Store Manager got to know that I usually avoid walking past the pallets with promotional products to avoid running into other shopping carts who have no view of incoming traffic.

This incident reminiscent of the British Comedy "Are you being Served" was another reminder on the scant visibility to what happens in-store with a shopper once he or she walks-in.

Shopping in-store continues to be holy grail of Retailing. Rowan Pelling writing in The Telegraph UK notes that a real shopping experience beats E-Bay anyday with his preference to

prod and squeeze a product like a French peasant sizing up plums.

Prodding and squeezing may not be the only things shoppers are looking to do these days. The Belfast Telegraph notes that Irish shoppers are looking for ways to reduce grocery bills.

In a report out today, it says almost one-third of shoppers spread their spending across a number of supermarkets.

Retailers are being setup against each other for a greater share of that monthly grocery basket by that value conscious shopper.

A recent report by Unilever titled "Winning Shoppers in Turbulent Times" throws further insight on how the value conscious shopper is changing habits.

The number and types of shopping trips are changing. People are combining errands to make fewer trips and they are buying more on each trip.

People are already employing savings strategies, such as clipping coupons, as they seek both quality and value

But what can the Retailers do about this value conscious shopper ?

They have no idea who she is most of the time, atleast not until checkout. They very rarely know what the shopper has on her shopping list while she walks the aisles. What is worse as she wanders around the aisles in search of value, they have no way of getting in front of her with the right messages.

What if one were to conjure up an innovation with the intelligence to not just divine what shoppers are interested in but also the ability to influence what they actually buy - will the industry embrace such an innovation ?

Conversations with Executives in the Retail and Consumr Packaged Goods on this question have revealed some predictable and some intriguing reactions.