As inflated grocery prices have sent shoppers heading to different retailers and switching to private labels to cross everything off their lists, getting consumers to keep coming back to the same retailers and brands has become a loyal pain.
From personalization to new innovations, Stuart Aitken, chief merchant and marketing officer at Kroger, and Gregory Guidotti, CMO at Ferrara Candy Company, owner of brands like Nerds, Trolli, and SweeTarts, have found several ways to effectively engage wayward shoppers. Retail Brew sat down with Aitken and Ferrara at Groceryshop in Las Vegas earlier this month to discuss how consumers’ needs are shifting and the top strategies they’re employing to keep them coming back.
This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
Driving loyalty through innovation
Guidotti: [Nerds] was a brand that was launched in 1983…It’s an incredible business. People knew about the brand, but there’s an element of it being messy. So it tracked around a $50 million business. A few years ago, it’s like, “It’s a brand that’s known. How do you make it more relevant for the time?”
In a broad consumer trend, consumers are looking for more complex mouth feel, multi-texture, multi-sensorial, multi-flavor, multi-color, and then this element of popability and convenience. And it all came together in this one element that brought the Nerds brand—those little tangy, crunchy pieces—now put together in a Nerds Gummy Cluster. It was honestly this exponential growth of the business that skyrocketed the business from $50 million to over $700 million in just under five years. It’s that power of [having] a brand that’s known, you’re understanding the trends that are driving the consumer and what they’re looking for, and it just all came together. I say to my team a lot, “When you know who you are, you know what to do. When you understand the foundation of that business, you know the spaces that you could play in.”
Identifying and addressing consumer pain points
Aitken: You’re seeing customers needing more time, and this is something that we are constantly working on at Kroger.
Today online, because of personalization…it’s four times faster to shop online today than it was just three years ago at Kroger. Constantly timing how long it takes for a customer to fill their basket—that becomes incredibly important for us, and then making sure the product shows up on time for the consumer, because their time is massively valuable, and then ensuring they get all the products they want…One of the most important things the consumer is looking for is order accuracy. If you’re missing an item that’s in one of the bundles for, let’s say, a pasta dinner, and you’re missing the pasta, that’s an issue. You just think it’s one item—that’s dinner tonight, and that’s a problem for the consumer. Your NPS scores fall off a cliff when you lose one item. And don’t be thinking about it from a one-item standpoint; think about it in the context of that meal that your consumer now can’t fulfill because of it…Value is just as important—how do you offer value? Beginning of the month is very different than the end of the month. The beginning of the month, bigger pack sizes, etc.; end of the month, smaller price points, smaller pack sizes—that’s what the consumer is looking for. So constantly rolling through our data to understand what’s most important to the consumer. From a coupon standpoint, CPGs send out digital coupons all the time. We will scrape those for customers and then prioritize them based on what’s most important to them. So they don’t have to scroll through 600 coupons, they get to scroll through the 40 that are most important to them. So how do you save them time? How do you save them money, and do that cohesively together?
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Speaking to specific consumer groups
Guidotti: The product that we’re launching this year it’s called the Sour Brite Squad, and it’s actually three different shaped worms, but they all have a gaming personality.
That kind of element is what we’re seeing in the way we engage with consumers. Elden Ring was a game recently, and we rebranded some of our Peachie O’s—we do short runs, 1,000, you get them until they’re gone-type things. Those kind of elements, it really is like…“You see me, and I want that.” Trolli has done a pretty exquisite job of connecting with the gaming community and really providing products that deliver at scale with different values on our pack, whether it be with XBox, stuff we’re doing over the course with different IPs this season. But that kind of like one to one, see it on Reddit, it happens, it goes—we have that same kind of perspective coming across with our Gen Z consumer there.