Retailers should try increasing Consumer's spending pattern on Foods

Its only the 3rd day of April & temperatures are soaring in Northern part of India. I remember last year being a Summer Trainee i used to roam whole day sometime at 42 degrees covering entire organized retail in Ghaziabad for Dabur. Its high time for all the FMCG companies to boost their sales, since summers leads to heavy consumption of cola drinks, Juices, Ice-creams, Snacks & lots of consumer goods considered under category of impulse purchase.

Lets look at the consumption patters of an average middle class family in our country. On an average a family tends to spend around Rs.36 - Rs.38 of each Rs.100 earned on the Food products . Its high time companies try & increase this spending pattern on food items by creating various touch points with consumers. Off late on floor promotion has been an area of interest for the companies, with all the major fmcg players trying hard to find space for Secondary placing for their high selling products of summer season.

Companies should further try to generate interest of consumers by trying out BTL activities for the Food product. Activities like Sampling are of high interest for consumers in the Organized Retail Store, try putting in Secondary Placements with free sample counter for products like juices, cola drinks, ice creams or even snacks, consumers tend to get drawn towards it & untimately it leads to a definate or a purchase at most of times by the consumer. I conducted this activity for the launch of new Dabur Drink "Burst" last season at ghaziabad & most of the times a sample drink lead to juice sales.

The other activity which very cheap & often leads to purchase is Coupons. Coupons when distributed though newspapers & magazines especially on a Sunday holiday often lead the sale of the product, since shoppers generally tend to utilize it on their shopping & sunday generally tends to be the best selling day across all organized retail stores. InStore Coupons is another area which yet to be fully utilized upon by the retailers. InStore coupons tend to work best on Complementory items. Try putting in Lays big packs at half the rates on 2ltr purchase of a Pepsi. Coupons need to be designed by the Retailers, since companies never tend to promote each other product so it can be best utilized by Retailers especially on Weekends Sales.

Besides increasing sales through these activities, retailer can get information what most of them have been looking out for regarding consumers eating habbits & shopping pattern, a very accurate idea of what kinds of schemes consumers are best looking out for, spending patterns in detail about food needs & how can they be converted into wants...

Its high time retailers come up with techniques to increase foot falls into the store & simultaneously design schemes which help increase ticket size or average revenue per shopper.

Its the time of consolidation for Organized Indian Retail.

Indian Consumers difficult to understand for Organized Indian Retailers

No surprises on reading this morning ET that MORE - aditya birla group's retail shut down 40 more stores,1/3rd of them in Gujrat & 1 of them in Ghaziabad my own city. With the current time being an age of consolidation for Indian Retailers, no surprises they are finding it difficult maintaing profits for all of their stores & that's what the CEO of MORE, Mr.Thomas Vergese has to say, that all these stores were unprofitable. Retailing is not about selling or making shoppers purchase & boost of some hefty bills from some shoppers, its all about EXPERIENCE,

What these big Retailers are not realizing is that they are not able to connect with the consumers in the localities in which they are opening a store. Moreover the shoppers arent enjoying the Experience, which they expect from an Organized retail store.

Being a Organized Retail Freek i often put up discussions with people i come across. Take some real incidence my family & nearby locality experienced in this recently shut down MORE store in Ghaziabad

The very first experience i would like to mention is of my own father, he often used to have verbal exchanges with the store boys, since they never had loose money at the billing counter, often these floor boys would ask my father loose money when he is done with the shopping. How can you even ask a customer to take out money in the form you require...frustated & not happy at all, my father would leave all the items then & there at the counter itself & walk out of the store.

Once on a early Sunday morning i went to the store to purchase "Multi Grain Bread", this kind of bread you will find in MORE or FOOD Bazaar's store only, traditional retailers dont keep it & it costs Rs.25, suddenly an aunty came running in asking for Bread, she was new to this kind of stores & its format, she started shouting for Bread from the enterance door itself, none of the floor boys bothered to help or guide her, then she came to know that there is no Rs.10 (Britannia Bread) in store, since store doesnt kept those breads, disgusted with the store she left....again an inability to understand traditional customer by the Indian retailer, if an Indian retailer wants to grow a brand of their choice, they need to put all kinds of products available in its store & let the consumer decide which product provides true value & what does the consumer actually wants, not providing a product of their choice simply leads to shopper walk out without even examining the options available..

Some other people in my locality recount of the difficulties they had to face at the store, although store had 3 billing counters available, but only 1 use to be operational every time, since floor boys never actually used to spend time on floor and i guess they were really blessed with some great store manager, who never ever bothered to come on floor to check what's going on?

Lets go to the Beverages section, the section i love the most in a Food Store. Its high time for this section especially when you are in North India. Summers come here early & North India account for 60% of Fruit Juice sales in the country. Still i see no variants of fruits juices except couple of flavours in form of orange & mango, leave juices this store doesnt even had all variants of Cola drinks, i searched for Appy Fizz & Grapo, the two wonderful siblings from Parle Agro Family, i didnt find any of them...

I read about so many strategies on Organized retail stores keeping customer databases for maintaining loyal customers as a strategy for long term engagement with shoppers, even this MORE store was issuing coupons to some heavy billed customers for further purchase, so that they compulsorily visit the store next time. Alas, these strategies only seem to deviced again keeping short term profits in mind i.e. increasing billing amounts, rather the strategy should be each time a better experience & purchase.

Poor Retailer, one wonders how can he expect to acheive profits in this daily getting dense organized retail market...with new retailers expanding cautiously, maintaing loyality among customers first before going for next store, the store was surely lacking badly on strategies for targeting local customers, surprise inspections, store analysis and lots & lots of things...

EASY DAY, Bharti's much hyped retail has annouced his arrival at my city yesterday in a recently opened new mall with a lot of dhol dhamaka,,,they even carried out a indian wedding style procession on the streets of Ghaziabad,,,lets home they do some basics right before going for the kill,,,

Welcome another Organized Indian Retailer to my city