CPGmatters: Welch's Focuses on Shoppers to Increase Category, Brand Sales
Through a special arrangement, presented here for discussion is an excerpt of a current article from the monthly e-zine, CPGmatters.
Welch's is leveraging shopper insights to drive category revenue for retail partners for its assortment of jams and jellies. For example, Welch's can help the retailer convert existing shoppers who shop the category in other chains. In addition, it can increase the "buy rate" of existing category buyers in the retailer's stores.
To facilitate the process and obtain insights, Welch's relies on a program from IRI called Shopper Insight Explorer.
"The Shopper Insight Explorer program is an easy way to look at the leakage," said David Moore, business development manager at Welch's, in a presentation at a CPG summit hosted by Information Resources, Inc. (IRI) recently in Las Vegas. "For each category you look at, to what degree is my retailer attracting a shopper in the category, and where are they missing opportunities? Where are they attracting the shopper, but the shopper is buying the category elsewhere?"
According to the program, the retailer in the example captures about 8 percent of U.S. households. About seven of ten households buy jams and jellies somewhere in the marketplace, not necessarily at the retailer.
"That's a pretty broad household penetration," said Mr. Moore. "But the question is: Are they doing well with this shopper? Most retailers can tell you about what their shopper does when they're in the store. They don't really know what happens when they go outside those walls, and what potential opportunities [exist] if they were to convert some of those shoppers to their store."
According to the analysis, the retailer was only capturing 13 percent of the total potential shoppers who buy jams and jellies; in other words, 87 percent of their shoppers who buy jams and jellies bought them outside of the account.
"I want to know why," said Mr. Moore. "That's a big shopper opportunity. It's a great jumping off point, a leakage tree. Well, this retailer and I decided we're going to focus on getting new shoppers into the store to buy this category."
When looking at the attributes that this shopper prefers, Moore found that this retailer had only one of the key package types - jars. They didn't carry any of the squeezable packages.
"We looked at the demographics of the squeeze shopper versus the demographics of the jar shopper," he said. "We discovered that the squeeze shopper is a unique shopper. It is more affluent and from a slightly younger and smaller household, which is exactly the target this account wanted to attract."
In the 26 weeks prior Welch's bringing in new product, the category was about $3 million in sales and was flat in terms of growth. Welch's was able to achieve category growth of 29 percent. The non-Welch's products grew 22 percent.
"This was going to be incremental to the category growth and it was," he said. "It brought in new shoppers and grew category usage. Overall, it's a win-win for the shopper, for us, and for the retailer."
Discussion Question: What does shopper analysis tell you about why customers aren't shopping a store for a certain category? What doesn't it reveal? What are the overall challenges in analyzing and understanding why a customer shops competitors for certain categories?