Solving in-store promo discovery to enhance the grocery store customer experience

Choice overload and the grocery shopping experience

The average grocery store is over 48,000 square feet and contains over 30,000 items on its shelves, requiring shoppers to navigate an enormous number of choices in a single trip. These choices are mediated by grocery planograms and circulars that highlight relevant promotions and potential savings, as well as seek to influence purchase decisions.

The rise of mobile phones – 90% of shoppers use their phones in-store – has created an opportunity to engage consumers and deliver a better shopping experience. Yet some of the same challenges that exist in the physical world persist in these mobile apps. While these apps are a great vehicle for aggregating promotions, helping users get rewarded for their everyday purchases, the presentation and discovery is generally limited to a long list view that requires scrolling through (oftentimes hundreds of) offers to find the right one.

The result is a suboptimal experience, curbing the amount of promotional content that can be discovered. For shoppers, it impedes the discovery and redemption of cashback rewards or other savings ($ in their pockets), while for companies, it restricts their ability to deliver content and reward users ($ to their bottom line).

It’s time to reimagine the future of promotion discovery – for the benefit of consumers and brands

By combining first-party data with exciting tech advancements and a customer base that is primed for next-generation shopping experiences, forward-thinking organizations can deliver on the promise of truly personalized promotions – in other words, offering the right offer to the right customer, at the right time, via the right channel.

In-store and on-shelf, this problem is impossible to solve with current methods, so companies must leverage the powerful tech device that is already at their disposal – consumers’ mobile phones.

In the store of the future, personalization is king

Now let’s imagine the grocery store of the not-so-distant future, where consumers use their mobile devices to scan and capture products on grocery shelves. Using ongoing advancements in computer vision, image recognition, and machine learning, products are automatically identified down to the UPC level, opening up exciting possibilities for personalized promotions and product discovery.

In this future vision, consumers can automatically turn their phone into a personal shopping assistant that helps them navigate the supermarket. The food shopping experience is elevated to include the best of online shopping, surfacing relevant promotions and dietary or nutritional information, ratings and reviews, and other timely offers or recommendations based on where shoppers are, past purchases, and preferences.

For brands and existing loyalty/promo applications that work hard to engage consumers closer to the purchase decision, this overcomes the inefficiencies of traditional promo methods, which are limited to print or relatively straightforward digital assets. Brand marketers now have a highly visual, creative, and dynamic method to delight consumers, opening up the door to greater revenue, loyalty, and life-time value.

Greater personalization + greater rewards = happier, more engaged customers.

Making this vision a reality

As the grocery landscape continues to rapidly evolve, it’s essential for brands and disruptors to stay agile and responsive to changing consumer tastes, while also keeping close to tech and industry innovations that are poised to reimagine the store experience.

The COVID-19 pandemic helped transform the traditional path to purchase, accelerating the merging of the physical and digital world. As a result, the grocery ecosystem has been forced to meet consumer expectations for a more seamless, personalized omnichannel experience. Companies need to put their first-party data to work, testing and refining personalized experiences. By adopting a forward-thinking mindset, investing in data and data infrastructure, and focusing on extending or improving existing loyalty, promotions or revenue-generating programs, companies can unlock more engaged, delighted and loyal customers for the long-term.