Situation
Most grocers use the name of their store as the brand for their front-of-store categories of produce, deli, bakery, and meat. This makes sense because these categories exemplify their brand. Target sold more categories than groceries, so using its main Bullseye logo on a single brand created a branding disconnect. Without that singular brand in the front-of-store grocery categories, there wasn’t a cohesive way to communicate freshness, meals deals, promotions, or easy dinner ideas. Target needed to establish a front of store brand that would exemplify the grocery department.
Insights
Consumers said that the boxed products in the center of the grocery store generate a similar experience from store to store, so it was difficult for grocers to create a differentiated position in these categories. Only consumers looking for low price made store choice decisions based on these categories. To be judged on differentiation instead of price, it was important to have a unique, memorable, fresh front-of-store experience that consumers could relate to. Front-of-store differentiation could outweigh a slight price advantage in the boxed center-of-store categories.
The key to improved guest perception of Target Grocery lie in improving the front-of-store experience.
Challenge
Create a cohesive, compelling, fresh front-of-store experience to increase consumer’s perception of freshness and differentiation at Target.
Role
I identified the opportunity, and then led the initiative to create a brand for the fresh categories. This required aligning multiple divisions of merchants, marketing, store operations, and pricing teams.
Action
The strategy was approached from the consumer shopping journey perspective and broken down into three segments; prior to shopping, the shopping environment, and facilitating shopping. Prior to shopping work included the content and creative look and feel that would help customers chose Target when making a store choice. This tactic was focused on showing the new front-of-store experience to consumers to encourage them to come try the grocery categories. This was expressed in social media, web pages, and print advertising.
It was important to create a shopping environment that created a consistent, easy to navigate, welcoming atmosphere through packaging, singing, and fixturing. The packaging needed to create a consistently shopping experience across category, and include easy navigation and product call outs. Consistent packaging and branding allowed for easy promotions across the brand and helped the consumer create meal combinations. Signing was also an integral part of the environment because it facilitated interaction between categories with promotions and navigation at a higher level. Fixtures that displayed fresh food in an attractive way that was consistent with the signs and packaging completed the experience.
Facilitating shopping required improving the shopping aides which reduced consumer barriers to product trial and expanded the number of items being purchased in one trip. This included many shopper marketing strategies. The most successful activations were Cartwheel mobile app offers, digital and printed coupons, in-store product sampling, and digital recipes. Sampling and recipes allowed consumers to understand how products fit within their normal cooking behaviors. The discounting tools allowed consumers to try the product at a deep discount for their first purchase, and subsequent discounts required multiple items to expand the consumer’s basket.
Result
By bring all of these front-of-store categories together under one brand, the product would look more fresh at the front of the store, it created easy to understand meal deals and boxed meals, and created cohesive sales collateral and in-store signing. These three wins would increase consumer perception of front of store freshness.
Theodore Schweitz 