(or, how to keep Amazon and Walmart from eating your lunch – and dinner)
With Amazon’s acquisition of Whole Foods Market just a few short months ago, it finally happened – Grocery was dragged (kicking and screaming) into the Digital Differentiation Cage Fight. Grocery, hypermarket and “grocerant” retailers are at a crossroads, and the savviest strategy lies in differentiating ways to stock, shop and serve your customers.
Hottest trends since last summer include customer-driven approaches to dynamic category management, farm-to-table food origin choice and transparency, mobile chatbots that order meal kit dinners and diapers for curbside pick-up, and voice shopping dialogs that plan a gourmet dinner party. Maybe Grocery was wise to wait on digital, as these would all be considered leading edge in any retail commerce sector.
Tradition built over the past hundred years and challenges in perishable supply chain logistics have kept the “in-store floorplan” intact as the primary merchandising model in grocery. Making the leap from “how we stock and sell food” to “how our customers shop and digitally engage” has lagged other retail sectors. Not anymore - consumer needs, preferences, tastes and lifestyles are at their most visceral disconnect with old school business paradigms when it comes to putting the right food on the table at the right moment.
Join us for this roundtable, where we’ll discuss the digital smackdown fight in Grocery, and identify key areas where differentiation can mean prosper or perish:
- Understanding the confluence of trends, new players and events fueling this revolution
- How customer journey “shopping modes” are critically different in grocery
- How to provide customized digital experiences based on customer shopping mode (Commodity, Quick Eats, Meal Planning)
- Enabling creative digital and in-store product merchandizing through in-depth understanding of your assortment, partners, region, and customers
- How to shift from stocking-centric to customer-centric in category management, “ways to shop” and new concierge “ways to serve”
Learn more about how EIS can help you reinvent your grocery ecatalog. Download PDF.
