Improving customer's shopping experience at the store is vital

The topic on "Building Visibility for Brands in the Traditional Retail Space” held at In-Store Asia 2015 was deftly handled by Nitin Saini, Head - Customer Marketing, Mondelez India. He presented three case studies on what can traditional retailers do on brand building and consumer connect. "In the fast-changing retail landscape, traditional retailers are facing multiple challenges and customer-centricity plus innovative approach is the key to survival and growth,” Saini said.

He added that there are two mantras for innovation in the advent of competition. First is to understand customer needs and offer relevant solutions, secondly one should look at improving customer's shopping experience in the store.

In the first mantra, it is essential to understand customer needs and offer relevant solutions. For this, Saini shared his first case study on home delivery service. In this, he said that it is important to have an identified customer need by convenience of placing order from home. Secondly, it is critical to find an opportunity to influence the customer's order through up-selling, cross-selling or, impulse purchase in home delivery orders.

"For this, we need to have a solution concept, a trigger reminder impulse for shopper and influence home-delivery order at order planning stage - distribution of promo pamphlets to households. We also need to do this at order placement stage - say a caller-tune (brand message) on retailer's number,” said Saini.

In his second mantra, Saini said it is extremely important to improve customer's shopping experience in the store. For this, he presented two case studies - one on applying basic category management principles and second on running shopper promotions like Modern Trade.

For applying category management principles, he said that the basic enablers for a better shopping environment was to arrange products in brand blocks, have front façade brandings, keep the area organized and give shopper access to browse and touch/feel products. He said: "Point of Buying (BOP) merchandising and branding helps drive incremental sales and customer loyalty. BOP elements need to be customised as per store layout, category purchase behaviour and shopper profile.”

His last and third mantra on running shopper promotions in traditional trade included identified challenge. According to his observation, customers look out actively for on-shelf promotions in modern trade but traditional trade promotions are mostly limited to promoter-led activations due to challenges in offer communication to shoppers.

"The solution for this concept is to use point of sale merchandising (POSM) elements as a shopper communication medium. For this we executed non-promoter-led shopper promotion in traditional trade stores. About 7700 outlets were selected across the country on the basis of better levels of engagement and ability to execute,” shared Saini.  

"Everything is a blur”

Speaking on the same topic, Vishal Kumar Bhusari, Head Customer Marketing, GlaxoSmithKline Consumer Healthcare, began his presentation by saying that in today's traditional retail space, everything is a blur. "The best chassis is ineffective without good grip and tyres are equivalent to traction. Visual merchandising is equivalent to traction as they transport our brand's equity to our shoppers, they close the sale, and they are a growing investment for all of us. Our goal today is to win with shoppers so that they see me, choose me and buy me.”

He stated that there are four channels in a traditional trade and in them also, global trade channels consist of modern trade/grocery chains, traditional trade, pharmacy and alternative channels. He said we are thriving in an environment which is cramped for space, cluttered, and having competition beyond categories. "In the universe of premium grocery (traditional) channel, over 70 per cent of the stores belong to the high clutter group. Given the challenges, how do we win in the traditional trade environment?” questioned Bhusari.

Bhusari was quick to answer his own question by saying that it was important to identify shopper environments and hotspots and layer shopper messaging.

According to him, shopper fundamentals still remain the same - keep shopper at forefront, clear and concise messaging in line with brand heart and messaging. "It's time to do simple things to make big difference” he concluded.