Last year we wrote about what a transformative trade conference the inaugural GroceryShop event had been. Few of the attendees–even among the event creators who developed the wildly-successful Shoptalk event–understood the magnitude with which the GroceryShop experience would resonate with brands, retailers and solutions providers.
Originally planned for 1,000 attendees, the rolls swelled to over 2,000 by the time the show opened. This year, attendance is expected to exceed 3,000 grocery-focused industry professionals.
GroceryShop is able to draw such a crowd because the gravitas of their speakers eclipse those of any other similar food and beverage show. A veritable who’s who of retail and brand ecommerce and marketing luminaries, GroceryShop is poised to define the omnichannel customer experience direction of the industry for the year to come.
Here are seven major themes that we expect to play out in the presentations and discussions next week in Las Vegas:
1. Content Is King
Shoppers expect product content to be accessible online, in-store and in-between. This includes pricing, availability, visual content, product descriptions, in-store aisle location, ratings, reviews, questions, answers, coupons, recipes, nutritional information and health lifestyle compliance (Vegan, Paleo, Non-GMO, etc.).
If a retailer isn’t able to make the content available to its shoppers, expect them to turn to Amazon, even if they are walking your aisles or browsing your site. Amazon now displays product ratings and review count on digital shelf tags in their physical stores. Other retailers need to wake up and take notice.
2. Shoppers Seek Trust & Demand Authenticity
It should not surprise anyone that shoppers are more willing to trust product opinions of other shoppers they have never met more than the brand or the retailer that sold them an item. With all the talk of fake reviews, and government regulators seeking to identify and punish companies that do not deliver authenticity, expect success to be driven by how a brand communicates the underlying trust factors that go into the collection and display of shopper-generated content.
3. Digital Must Reach Brick & Mortar
If “click and mortar” retailers think digital is only meaningful for shopping outside of the store, think again. You cannot win shoppers in one channel only to lose them in another. Digital must be a complement to the physical shopping experience, informing and directing the customer as they traverse the store.
4. Native & Traditional Brands Blurring the Line
Remember digitally-native and micro brands like Dollar Shave Club? Now, these brands are entering physical stores. Check out Target with Harry’s, Quip and other brands that originally started online. Then look at Nike’s efforts to shift its business model to focus on direct to consumer. It isn’t just one or the other, and omnichannel retailers are competing to find the right model for growth.
5. Measuring the Customer Journey
Whether offline or online, retailers need to start benchmarking the shopper journey over time and against competitors. This is the only way they improve and grow their businesses. It’s important that retailers measure the customer journey, reduce costs and improve customer experience.
6. Retailers Must Own Their Customer Experience
Several years ago, grocery retailers of all sizes were faced with the challenge that Peapod, Amazon Fresh and Walmart mounted in establishing formidable ecommerce beachheads in their industry. Anyone who works in retail understands the resource constraints, both technical and financial, that inhibit them from moving quickly and decisively.
Along comes Instacart with a model that involves little to no capital or resource investment in exchange for a digital presence. But the price paid by the retailers who joined the Instacart family was a homogeneous customer experience that they can no longer afford to tolerate, especially if Instacart is poised to be a direct competitor.
Expect grocers small and large to seek ways to customize or even configure the customer experience to be more unique.
7. Data Will Define Success
This week Target announced it would launch a new loyalty program in October. Getting customers to willingly identify themselves in transactions helps build rich longitudinal sales data. This in turn can be used to profile shoppers and build propensity models for communications targeting.
Club stores already attribute 100% of item sales to individual households. Major grocers like Kroger are close and in the 95%+ range, which allows them to drive measurable sales lift through precision marketing (just ask Kroger’s 84.51 division).
Retailers need to use AI-driven Natural Language Processing to make sense of all the shopper sentiment they collect that informs brands about what themes and words are most closely associated with positive and negative product perceptions.
Expectations are set high and Groceryshop is sure to please.