4 WAYS TO BE A CUSTOMER-OBSESSED FOOD RETAILER

Eric Karlson 
08/28/2019

The Great Recession impacted consumers’ tastes and preferences over the past 10 years. If a retailer isn’t carefully monitoring the changing needs of customers, gaps can quickly emerge, which open the door to competitors. 

The biggest driver of changes in consumer behavior is income, and for much of the post-WWII period, real incomes (adjusted for inflation) have been rising. The chart below illustrates these income changes over the past 40 years.

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• The economy and real incomes rebounded in 2014, and have recently surpassed pre-recession levels.

The changes in real income also had a direct impact on grocery gross margins. The chart below shows grocery gross margins before and after the recessions. Prior to the recession, margins rose as shoppers demanded higher-quality items. Margins leveled out in the 2000s and began falling post-recession. Pre-recession shoppers sought out quality, but in the post-recession period, shoppers transitioned to price and value.

We can clearly see there was a significant shift in pre- and post-recession consumer behavior, but what happened to gross margins when incomes rebounded? Did they return to pre-recession trends? Real incomes have significantly rebounded and now exceed pre-recession levels, but gross margins have only marginally improved, which suggests these consumer changes could be long-lasting. 

Private brands and retailer growth by retailer type can also shed some light on the return to pre-recession behaviors. If shoppers were returning to pre-recession behaviors, we would expect private-brand dollar share to fall back to pre-recession levels. The opposite is occurring, and private-brand penetration continues to grow even as incomes have risen. 

We know that real incomes began to aggressively rebound in 2014. So what types of retailers have been winning the past five years? If we were returning to pre-recession trends, quality and premium items should be growing relatively fast. Based on the 2019 Dunnhumby Retailer Preference Index (RPI), that’s not the case. Price-focused retailers in the bottom right quadrant of the chart below have strong price perceptions and weaker quality perceptions. On average, they’re growing twice as fast as the premium banners in the upper left-hand quadrant over the past five years.

Finally, Bank of America asserted that the past 10 years have been the “Discount Store Decade.” Its research found that lower-income spending is growing faster than the higher-income groups, and this spending is focused on discount products and retailers. Bank of America concluded the report by saying that there’s no sign of a slowdown in low-income consumer spending.

Based on the significant changes that resulted from one of the biggest economic events over the past 100 years, many retailers aren’t moving “at the speed of consumers” in making significant adjustments to their value proposition, or are moving in the wrong direction. 

Gaps between their value propositions and customer needs have grown, and these gaps have opened the door to many of the more value-focused banners like Aldi gaining market share.

TOP-PERFORMING RETAILERS UNDERSTAND WHAT DRIVES CONSUMERS’ PREFERENCES

After the Great Recession fundamentally changed the customer and retailer relationship, in 2018, Dunnhumby developed a model and a corresponding Retailer Preference Index (RPI) to gain some understanding of what drives consumer choice. With survey data from more than 7,000 U.S. households, the index looks at about 60 of the largest U.S. grocery retailers and associates their emotional connection with consumers and financial performance with how they score on various preference drivers. 

These drivers include customer perceptions regarding price, assortment, store experience, convenience, speed, discounts/rewards and operations. Associating the preference drivers with financial performance allows us to understand which preference drivers have the biggest impact on performance, both financial and emotional. Also, after ranking each retailer, we profiled the four quartiles to understand how those retailers at the top were different from those at the bottom. 

Our first-quartile retailers, seen in the table below, had more targeted value propositions and consistently performed better financially and emotionally. The top quartile grew 11 times faster than the bottom quartile, four times faster than the third quartile and two times faster than the second quartile. Unlike the other three quartiles, the top-quartile retailers had larger swings in their preference pillar scores because they were making trade-offs to deliver in those areas that were most valued by their shoppers, while ignoring other areas that weren’t. That doesn’t necessarily mean that they’re more customer-focused, but their strong performance does suggest that they’re meeting the most important needs of their customers better than other retailers are.

Trader Joe’s is a good example of this. The company has been ranked No. 1 the past two years and is likely the most profitable grocery retailer in the United States. It wins because it focuses on price and quality, even at the expense of many “shiny objects” and consumer “trends” — convenient locations, winning big baskets, ready-to-eat items and digital.

In contrast, the bottom-quartile retailers struggled with focus. They were often near average across the less important preference pillars — discounts/rewards, speed, operations — but then scored poorly on the most important ones — price and quality. In addition, many had relatively strong promotion scores but poor overall price scores, which suggests that promotion was the only lever they were comfortable pulling, and as a result, it had probably been pulled too much. 

We also hypothesize that promotion is the only lever that they’re comfortable pulling, because they don’t deeply understand their customers. Moreover, many of these poorly performing retailers are using their limited resources and investing them in ecommerce or repositioning themselves as more upmarket. In both instances, this will only exacerbate their problems. 

So there’s evidence that the top-quartile retailers meet the needs of shoppers better than those in the bottom quartile. We can’t definitively say that they’re more customer-focused, but their business choices suggest that they understand their customers’ needs better than others.  

WHAT DOES A CUSTOMER-FOCUSED RETAILER LOOK LIKE?

1. A customer-focused retailer assesses business decisions and investments through the customer lens first.It starts with a recognition that customers must be put first. Partners, vendors and shareholders are important, but they can have goals and objectives that don’t necessarily align with the customer or the retailer. If the retailer places the customer first, partners, vendors and shareholders have the best chance of sustainable success. 
2. A customer-focused retailer has a long-term view that maximizes value-added activities while minimizing value-deteriorating activities, even at the expense of short-term performance.Brand equity, the emotional connection, and financial growth are built incrementally over time. Short-term actions to raise prices in the back half of the year to hit the budget, adding SKUs to gain more back margin or clogging the aisles with promotions may help with short-term goals, but they’re value-deteriorating actions that erode brand equity and trust in the long run. Brand equity is a savings account, and each action that delivers customer value adds to the account. Further, each action that is counter to the customer results in withdrawals from the brand equity account.
3. A customer-focused retailer develops an organizational-wide strategy to align its value proposition with its key customers’ needs. Those that meet the needs of the customer the best will win the war for visits. The strategic process is a careful and candid assessment of your strengths and weaknesses, versus those of key competitors. This process relies heavily on customer data, both behavioral and attitudinal. Understanding these gaps helps the retailer diagnose its key issues and focus finite resources on those areas that will improve the retailer’s value proposition. 
4. A customer-focused retailer can assess how its actions impact quality and price perceptions, preference and financial performance.It’s difficult to create meaningful change if one can’t connect actions and investments to results. Should you build out ecommerce, move upmarket, or improve price and/or value perceptions? Feedback loops are essential to understanding which actions work and which actions don’t. Those that learn the fastest and convert that knowledge and insights into action first will have an advantage. For most retailers, this requires an investment in systems, data and analytics. The customer-focused strategy laid out above will help to identify what the right success metrics to measure are, and validate that your customers are worth the investment