UK Supermarkets Marketing Strategies.

University Degree Business and Administrative studies

Supermarket Marketing Strategy ID: 110021165

A successful supermarket should be good at using marketing strategies rather than simply providing food or other household necessities. The supermarket policy-makers have to readjust their strategies frequently to adapt to the random changes taking place within the industry since there is nothing constant in the crucial business world. Targeting needs of people in a family that ranges from all the population, the supermarkets in the UK compete fiercely with a great deal of strategies as follows to increase their market share.

Promotion

The purpose of promotion is to make consumers aware of the existence of the supermarkets, thus inducing purchase. Besides the advertisements on TV and Internet, supermarkets also use tools such as posters, leaflets, booklets, emails, and so on.

Being acknowledged, advertising is regarded as one of the most effective tools in the business world. The efforts evolve spending large sums on obtaining celebrity effect, reaching empathy from audiences through using children, housewives or animals as the main characters, and so forth. Besides, for the rapid growth and popularisation of the Internet, supermarkets more or less use emails as a key medium to spread its selling messages to affect the consumers’ propensity to buy.

Shelf & Product Placement

It is generally believed that 70 percent or more of purchasing decisions are made in-store, thus goods display and supermarket environment may determine customers’ purchase or change their shopping habits (Matamalas and Ramos, 2009). Shelf strategy, which has a close connection with products placement, focuses on the collocation of products on the shelves, having become a broad consensus. As Young (2008) pointed out, ‘when shoppers first view product categories, their dominant scan patterns are horizontal.’ This means that the ‘eye level’ tends to be more important, compared with the ‘hand level’ or ‘feet level’, since consumers will find it easier and clearer to see products coming to the first sight. It is the reason for expensive and famous band products usually being placed on this level. Hence, the company who owns the brand may pay supermarket so as to place their products there.

In addition, supermarkets may not place products randomly – they lay the high priority items that are bought regularly – milk, meat, cheese, bread, and beer – in different areas. Customers need to walk around the market to buy these necessities, and therefore buying more products impulsively. It is a well known fact that ‘the longer people spend in a grocery store the higher the chance of buying things that they were not originally planning on buying’(Brandon, 2011).

Music & Lighting

According to Baker (1992) and Morin (2007), ‘music has been shown to affect consumers’ responses to retail environments, typically in a positive manner.’ Specifically, supermarkets can play different types of music in different periods of a day and thus fulfill the needs of the whole family. For example, pop songs, being played at the noon, cater to the taste of students which come to buy lunch, might be replaced by soft and light music in the afternoon for the middle aged. Complementally, fast-paced music appears to lead customers to buy more quickly and rashly, thus spending ...

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Music & Lighting

Generally, supermarkets tend to use lighting to affect the presentation of the products, especially foods. To quote Newland and Hopper (2009), ‘using suitable lighting to merchandise increases visibility and can make stores seem more inviting.’ Further, they states that ‘fluorescent light can improve sales of a specific zone’. For instance, the use in the vegetables zone appears to make vegetables seem more ‘fresh’.

Multibuy & Hunger Factor

Multibuy, such as ‘Buy One Get One Free’ or ‘Buy Two for Five Pounds’, may not be a good deal as consumers complain frequently about wasting problem resulted from it. Also, many experts claim that the biggest tactic of supermarket shopping is the hunger factor – the larger amount of food appeal to the ones who are hungry while shopping. Hence, supermarkets often have fresh smells like bread or cooked chicken lingering in the air around meal times to stimulate people’s appetites and attract them to spend more time and money on the products displayed.

Tesco, Morrisons & Aldi

The move of Tesco and other UK supermarkets to focus on convenience foods and other ready-prepared foods is reasonable since the needs of consumers have changed. According to Davies (2001), healthy convenience food products are the main demand, followed by the safety requirements. Hence, supermarkets have to sell both ‘branded and own label products that suit the changing lifestyle of the modern family’. Tesco and Morrisons just do the same, yet their strategies are quite different.

Having grown to become UK’s number one retailer and one of Europe’s fastest growing financial company, Tesco’s almost entire relationship marketing strategy is based on its “Clubcard” scheme, shifting its focus on the intangibles or customer care – a variable that had been ignored by the supermarket industry for years (Turner and Wilson, 2006). According to Rowley (2005), Clubcard allows customers to save money on shopping by through price-off vouchers. It ‘integrates customer interaction across both partners in relation to the earning and delivery of rewards’. Moreover, the scheme introduces customers to other business such as Avis car-hire, Marriott Hotels and National Tyres, through established relationships and partnerships, and thereby building brand experiences and value. Customers benefit as well from earned points of using Clubcard at stores of any of these companies.

Being different from Tesco, Morrisons put more emphasis on fresh food. To quote Morrisons’s official website, ‘We produce fresh food for our stores by making it in-store or in our own manufacturing facilities. We deliver to our stores using our own distribution network.’ Michael Bates (2010), marketing director at Morrisons, stated that their aim is to prove that Morrisons is the only supermarket to sell 100% British fresh meat. The slogan – ‘eat fresh, pay less’ promoted its freshness message too, appealing to consumer’s wallets. Morrisons’ strategy also supports its ‘Let’s grow’ voucher scheme, which encourages customers to collect vouchers in-store that can be redeemed for gardening equipment for schools. The scheme has more than 20,000 participating schools competes with Tesco’s Schools & Clubs (Thomas, 2010). According to its 2010 annual report (Morrisons, 2010), Morrisons has announced that, for the six weeks to January 4, total sales were up 9.4%, with like-for-likes sales increasing 8.2%. Morrisons' growth reflects its sagaciousness of adopting the above strategies, and ‘it has also successfully leveraged its value credentials to its advantage, which has proved especially relevant in the current financial climate.’ (Verdict Research, 2009)

Aldi follows a simple but efficacious strategy. ‘A typical Aldi has only about 700 products and almost everything on display is an Aldi-exclusive label’ (Ewing, Zammert, Zellner, Tiplady, Groves and Eidam, 2004). Limiting consumer choice enables Aldi to exert strong control over quality and price, simplify shipping and handling and save money. The decision not to sell fresh meat also helps Aldi downsize the budget thus being able to ‘avoid steep refrigeration costs as well as the high wages demanded by meat-cutters’ unions’. (Khurana, 2010) Besides, Aldi has lesser number of staff than most other supermarkets. These cost saving strategies of ALDI helps to bring down the prices at the stores. As Karl Albrecht – one of the founder said, ‘Our business was managed solely on the basis of the lowest price’ (2004).

This study has attempted to discuss some of the strategies being widely used in supermarkets. Through introducing and evaluating strategies including promotion, shelf and products placement, music and lighting, multiply and hunger factor, the paper gives a general interview of how supermarkets obtain their objectives. Specifically, it presented several case studies involving Tesco, Morrisons and Aldi to show their differences in marketing strategy. To sum up, marketing strategies are vitally important to supermarkets boosting their market shares and should be changed from time to time in order to adapt to the current situation; however it is important that supermarkets recognise the limits of the strategies, and use them appropriately and frankly, rather than only focusing on the growth of benefits.

Reference

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