Fall in supermarket spending demands improved shopper understanding combined

with more effective range management

New research, which claims that “nervous households” are cutting back on their

weekly food shop to guarantee they can continue to afford holidays and eating

out, reinforces the importance of grocery retailers and suppliers ensuring their

offers are more in tune with shopper needs and demands.

Category and shopper management specialist Bridgethorne was commenting on new

Barclaycard research, which shows that spending in supermarkets fell 6.1 per

cent in the year to April, the biggest drop since Barclaycard started collating

these figures in 2011. Spending on clothing fell 3.5 per cent, the worst

performance in three years, at the same time that spending on air travel rose

6.5 per cent and spending in restaurants continued to grow at a significant 11.3

per cent.

John Nevens, Joint Managing Director at Bridgethorne, says that this may

indicate that current offers are not resonating with current shopper priorities.

He says that only by understanding what is happening in the market place can

retailers and suppliers develop the insights necessary to feed into range and

category strategies and enable successful actionable plans to be developed.

“Retailers and suppliers need to continually improve their understanding of what

shoppers are looking for and prioritising across all aspects of their lives.

Bringing enhanced shopper understanding together with more effective range and

category management is the only way to ensure they are offering what shoppers

want, when and where they want it.”

More resource, he says, should be devoted by suppliers and retailers to

organising shoppers based upon common shopping behaviours and personal profiles

and then overlay this shopper intelligence with range data to ensure the correct

balance and market coverage is achieved. This means factoring in the impact of

socio-economic factors on market trends, deriving insights from changing shopper

behaviour and using this to inform range management as well as category vision

and strategy.

“Suppliers and retailers need to know who their shoppers are and what is

motivating them at any point in time. They need to know that they are sending

the right messages to the right people at the right time. This Barclaycard

research shows they cannot be sure they are achieving this at this point in

time,” he adds.