Leo Burnett - Cultural Fuel

A few days ago, a new convenience store called frischwerk opened up in Düsseldorf.
One or two more stores will follow by the end of the year in Düsseldorf.

In this integrated endeavour, we from Leo Burnett Germany were responsible for brand strategy consulting, corporate design, shopper marketing consulting, POS materials, in-store communication tactics, store opening campaign and website design.

When the project started in spring this year – there was just an enthusiastic client with the idea to design a convenience store that would stand out of an emerging but still small market. And LB Germany, glad and excited to be part of this undertaking but also a bit overwhelmed by the complexity of such a huge project.

The journey entailed several workshops and presentations, lots of work and intensive discussions. We were even invited to test some products that were supposed to be listed. In the end, the result was pretty impressive.

The new store addresses two major human needs: On the one hand, people have very limited time to go shopping and so want their shopping needs to be satisfied quickly. On the other hand, people want quality goods and premium service like it used to be in the good old days. And currently, no concept exists in Germany that successfully meets both of these needs in one compelling offer.

And so, we built the store’s mission to marry what today is still scattered into different formats: a modern offering with traditional values, a retail atmosphere with culinary propositions, convenience with a smile, lifestyle with unpretentious coziness, organic products with taste, craftsmanship merged with digital services. In short: “Supplies for Body and Soul”.

This desired store experience is reflected in every single item and aspect – people are able to experience with all senses that it’s made with a lot of love and care – just take a look on the photos below.

Even if it sounds like we’re chumming up, this has been one of the most exciting projects – due to a passionate client team who stopped at nothing to bring their ambitious idea to life.

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I was so psyched when I saw this post on Swissmiss. Finally somebody took the time to point out the obvious obfuscation and mind-bogglingly inane product naming convention at Starbuck. I am sure people who ever ordered at Starbucks have found it to be a suboptimal transaction experience, too.

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The Japanese business magazine JapanInc reported about the test store Sample lab! which plays with the business idea that everyone loves new things that cost nothing. The designated customers of Sample Lab! are women between 20 to 30 years. They can try the newest cosmetics, snacks, electronic gadgets and energy drinks. They have the option to purchase a full-sized version of the product in-store, or to take home more free samples. To avoid “freebehunters” a membership registration is needed for a small budget.

Finally, customers have to fill out a questionnaire about the product they took home. The results are sold to the manufacturer(s). Nobody is surprised about the fact that behind Sample lab! stands a research institute.

via

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One of the largest German discount retailers, Lidl, recently started airing a brand campaign. The campaign itself, well, nothing special: the campaign is strongly reminiscent of Mastercard’s “Priceless” campaign, using people situations and using price tags for those situations. Also, the scenes look like they were selected out of stock film reels. Furthermore, it has a brand promise (”A trip to Lidl can be anything but expensive”) that, still reminds everyone: it’s about cheap prices, for which, if you’re honest, you don’t need a brand image campaign, cuz, duh, everyone knows that Lidl is a discounter, not Harrod’s. As a result, it probably tested really well in the pre-tests because it’s not saying anything (that can offend anyone).

What’s really more interesting is the fact that a German discounter actually started thinking about a brand image campaign in the first place. This is highly uncommon. The only “brand” communication we’re used to from discounters is inserts with pork loin offers, at EUR 2.99 for 500 grams for which discounters like Lidl and Aldi shell out a good 200-300 million Euro a year making sure we all have kilos of dead trees in our mailboxes. But a brand film? That’s new. So, what’s going on here?

I basically see it as a discounter’s desperate attempt to stop some trends in the making as far as the market situation is concerned. In Germany, there is a fight over market share going on among the different supermarket retail business models. Like elsewhere, we have three competing models:

1. Discounters (Lidl, Aldi, Penny…)
2. Hypermarkets (Real, Globus, Toom, Kaufland…)
3. Supermarkets (Edeka, Rewe…)

In the past, discounters really ate away the huge amounts of market share of Hypermarkets and supermarkets because of a couple of people behaviors: a) while in the past, discounters where frowned upon for having bad quality, they now established that you can even drive to a discounter in a Porsche if you don’t mind a stripped-down shopping experience: the quality is right, and it is cheaper than local supermarkets b) People’s lives and their shopping behavior has changed: people (especially the younger demographic) don’t shop for the whole week anymore, quick trips to the supermarket around the corner become more common, so hypermarkets with their huge assortment of goods are too far away, less convenient and, frankly, too huge for daily shopping convenience.

However, there are also 3 other trends that might force discount brands to rethink their strategy: a) discounters are everywhere now and have reached maximum proliferation, competing with supermarkets for local relevance which still own local convencience and quality of products, so you can’t grow more by building more outlets b) local supermarkets themselves have responded to discount pricing by increasing their share of private labels, allowing to approximate the price of discounters in a shopping environment that is more tasteful c) Organic foods are everywhere, and expected by people, and while discounters now also carry great organic food, the ambiance of organic food is still more trustworthy and personal in a more upmarket supermarket brand than picking it up from crates stored on pallets and high-fluctuation staffing structure.

So, with discounters having a hard time to grow beyond their proliferation, pure price communication not being sustainable (ever!), and shopping experience becoming a more and more important asset, discounters seem to have discovered brand advertising as a necessity, in order to mitigate the shopping experience strategies of supermarkets, such as REWE and Edeka.

However, I am not sure advertising can really help discounters here (especially if the promise is still just about price). At the very least it can’t help if discounters don’t also rethink their shopping experience strategy. Ads, after all, are just ads. Reformulating your reason for being and providing people with acts that improve their lives, in the context of their shopping needs should prove more successful in building trust than running some ads.

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More and more manufacturers and retailers are using service solutions enabled by technology. Some examples of in-store digital ad displays and real-time promotions can be found in a recent Business Week article.

One of my favourites: The Israel-based Aroma Espresso Bars.

According to the Business Week article: “When you order a morning coffee at a café owned by Israel-based Aroma Espresso Bars, an image of a croissant may suddenly appear on a digital display next to the cash register. Stop by for a sandwich or salad later in the day, and the display could flash a picture of a suggested beverage. Aroma Espresso says sales of desserts and drinks featured on the screens have increased as much as 68% in outlets where it has installed the display systems, starting about a year ago.”

And here is an example I’ve found in the Retail Customer Experience Magazine:

The SlideBuy Shopper Information System by Frank Mayer & Associates Inc. is a touchscreen placed on existing store shelving. It allows shoppers to inform themselves about the products. By gliding forth and back, product information is directly taken to the shelf without displacing existing products.

Since digital and retail worlds are more and more converging, it won’t take long until well-known social media applications from the Internet arrive in the store. Maybe Aroma Espresso Bar will soon start to display reviews, votings, rankings and recommendations by their customers.

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With more and more questions about traditional advertising effectiveness, non-traditional marketing methods, apart from digital marketing are gaining importance.

For inhouse shopper marketing discipline here at Leo Burnett, the following Deloitte study is music to our ears. The first moment of truth, meaning people and their behavior in front of the shelf is a key vehicle to increase relevance of your brand’s products.

Says Brandweek:

Nineteen percent of consumer packaged goods manufacturers and half of retailers rank shopper marketing as the most effective activity for generating strong return-on-investment. Overall, 75% of manufacturers and 86% of retailers studied ranked in-store marketing among the top four activities in terms of gaining strong ROI.

No 30 second spot will help you when your product isn’t staged the right way and can’t show off it’s unique purpose to people in the approriate context.

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We are currently undertaking a retail audit in Germany for our Shopper Marketing Retail Exchange, gauging the store experience people have in supermarkets. While doing so, we saw this:

What we see here is a cooler shelf with convenience products, such as sausages, paddies and the like. Do you see the title for the products?

“Convenience”

Remember, we are in Germany here. While the term is known in the retail industry, i.e. to store owners and purchasing departments, how many people do you think find it “convenient” to try to guess the meaning of an English word while looking at a bunch of sausages? And why on earth is it in English anyway? There are perfectly good names available in German.

You might say, who cares? When people see the products, they know what it is. Well yeah, when and if they see them. But think about it: people navigate stores by browsing or searching. When you search, you are on a wayfinding path where you check of “your” products from a list. Where would you start looking for “Convenience” food when you don’t even know the term? Also, convenience foods are often placed at tactically relevant places for cross-selling purposes. This means it’s already hard to find them when you are expressly looking for them.

For the most part, a lot of retail experiences are still like websites in the mid-90s: confusing navigation, little orientation, cluttered signage, price confusion, little customer service, and long checkout times. So, when we do experience audits, whether for digital channels or physical retail channels, what happens a lot is that I get a Gary Larson moment. While surveying the store, I was reminded of his “Inconvenience Store” Comic.

When it comes to retail experiences, it’s definitely time some stores took more of a human view point. Apart from being better for people, it also helps your sales.

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