Skip to main content

Keeping it simple for shoppers



Local shops can make high impact promotions work for them with the application of a little thought - and sticky tape.

My thanks to Andy Singh for following up my comments last week with this photograph showing a new promotion he is running. Through his wholesaler, Andy bought into a buy a Pepsi and a Wispa Gold for £1 deal.

He took some time to tape the chocolate bars to the cola drink with the aim of making the promotion as simple as possible for his shoppers.

"It is flying out with the teenagers," he told me today when I asked him how the promotion was going.

From a question I asked him last week, Andy decided that he needed to check whether shoppers could easily understand the promotions he was running. The easier he makes it for them to buy, the more they will buy.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Digital disruption in the UK wholesale space

“Twenty years ago I was driving boxes to the post office in my Chevy Blazer and dreaming of a forklift,” says Jeff Bezos in his most recent letter to shareholders. A blink later and he points out that the company has grown from 30,000 employees in 2010 to 230,000 now. But his ambition is the same. “We want to be a large company that’s also an invention machine. We want to combine the extraordinary customer-serving capabilities that are enabled by size with the speed of movement, nimbleness and risk-acceptance mentality that is normally associated with entrepreneurial start-ups.” Amazon is great at disruption because of its customers focus and the fact that the internet means it needs none (or very few) people between its warehouses and the shopper. The threat of Prime, its membership service, is the biggest challenge facing the UK retail market and the wholesale market by extension. It is both a direct threat and an indirect threat in that is inspiring countless numbers of othe...

Traffic lights: a fuss about nothing

I am sure that FT columnist Michael Skapinker has written about traffic lights food labelling before and his latest article is provocatively called: The food companies that make people fat. He criticises Coca-Cola and Unilever for sticking with guideline daily amounts (GDAs) when traffic lights work much better. Former Walmart Europe public affairs head Bernard Hughes wrote in to support Skapinker. He said: "There isn't ever a perfect information system flowing with beautiful logic. But traffic lights give powerful direction to the busy consumer." But in this age of smart phones surely this debate over the labelling on the packaging is easily overcome. The government can simply issue an app that when held over a bar code provides shoppers with a traffic light system. The supermarkets could do this on their websites. Surely the whole point about the future is that the internet and limitless data storage means that the shopper is being empowered with the informatio...

A sign of retail stress perhaps

It must have been four months since this window was broken in the Tesco Express on Pentonville Road and I simply cannot believe that it has not been fixed. This is the sort of lack of focus that independent shops usually get criticised for. The only purpose in sharing this image is to encourage those independents with high standards who are finding the going tough that they can do better than this.