CPGmatters: Supervalu Boosts Brands by Re-engineering Center Store
Through a special arrangement, presented here for discussion is a summary of a current article from the monthly e-zine, CPGmatters.
When it came to the crucial but outmoded center of their stores, Supervalu executives realized that shoppers were drowning in merchandising messages, price promotions and other communications -- hurting the company's CPG suppliers as well as the chain's own performance.
"We would talk to customers and they would tell us that they didn't think the center store was clean," Shawne Murphy Johnson, Supervalu's group vice president of brand strategy and marketing, told CPGmatters. "Then when we dug into what they meant by that, it wasn't what you might think; it wasn't things like, 'The floor didn't look swept.' They were actually commenting about the amount of messaging in the center store and telling us it was way too much, or just confusing. They were feeling 'over-spoken to.'"
Supervalu found shoppers had gotten frustrated by increasingly dimensional brand promotions that were attached to and hanging from shelves and that actually made it more difficult for them to access the products themselves. And some in-store media underperformed. For example, floor graphics would get dirty by the end of their cycle.
As a result, brand marketers -- including Procter & Gamble and Mars -- are working with Supervalu banners as well as marketing services giant Valassis to rationalize and reduce signage in the center aisles, emphasize promotional pricing at the shelf, heighten the effectiveness of brand messaging at point of purchase, and provide consumers with more relevant and useful information about the products and how they can be used.
Supervalu worked with Valassis to come up with three basic types of streamlining and accompanying improvements in message efficacy.
The first involved signage. Instead of one or two or even three-dozen different types and sizes of signage in the center store, Supervalu's new plan has just two essential iterations. One of them is a four-by-six-inch sign at shelf's edge that communicates the brand, product attributes and key values. The second type trumpets price.
The second manifestation of Supervalu's streamlining came in how it handles point-of-sale coupons. Valassis and Supervalu contrived a new on-shelf coupon dispenser, just a few inches square, to attack this challenge. It allows CPG brands to use miniature signage on the dispenser that shoppers see from three sides. And the hard-plastic fixtures have clean and unobtrusive lines. Mars, for example, "loves this fixture because it really takes what they're trying to do with their packaging and brings it out to the consumer by putting the same image that's on the packaging on the box. It's pure branding," said Mike Kowalczyk, in-store general manager at Valassis.
Third, Valassis and Supervalu overhauled how they dispense "consumer information" such as recipe sheets and nutritional brochures. CPG brands including Bertolli and McCormick were interested in effectively communicating with shoppers how they could make meals using olive oil and spices, for example. But this imparted too much information for a mere sign, and putting a stack of flyers inside the supermarket door wasn't going to cut it either.
So Valassis came up with a standardized, cardboard "Take One" dispenser, with a changeable header, that it calls InfoPop, which can dispense recipe sheets, coupons, sweepstakes entries, mail-in rebate forms and all variety of important brand information to shoppers.
Overall, Ms. Murphy Johnson said, "instead of 15 or 16 different [in-store marketing] vehicles, we're down to just five or six. Instead of four different sizes of things, we have one size. And we're not putting messaging on the floor anymore."
Discussion Questions: What do you think of Supervalu's attempts to de-clutter messaging around the center store? What move (rationalizing signage, on-shelf coupon dispenser, "Take One" recipe dispenser, etc.) do you think holds the most promise for improving center store performance?