Getting your product noticed in the supermarket

Getting shoppers to choose your ready meals rather than another brand’s, or to even select some ready meals at all, is not simple. In this article, Phillip Adcock, managing director of Shopping Behaviour Xplained, looks at the difficulties consumers face as they shop in their local supermarkets.

The explosion in product choice, combined with the constant bombardment of us with special offers, money-saving deals and other tempting communications in-store, has resulted in the creation of shopping emporia so mentally challenging that, quite simply, we are unable to make the sensible and rational decisions needed to get the best value for money when we shop. Research conducted by Shopping Behaviour Xplained (SBX) of more than 10,000 supermarket shoppers reveals that although we try to make sensible decisions as we shop, much of the time we are mentally ill-equipped to do so.

SBX Managing Director Phillip Adcock commented: “We have evolved from our ancestors, who gathered food by foraging in the forests for the ripe red berries and hunting animals. Their choices were simple. For example, red berries are sweet and ripe; green ones are bitter and best left alone. That is what our brains were originally designed to do. But now it’s oh so different. In 1975, there were less than 9000 products in the average supermarket. Now there are around 50,000. Our brains simply can’t rationally and objectively calculate the pros and cons of each of the different 320 cheese items, the 115 jellies or even the 100-plus different tea products in the aisle.”

Multiply this experience by all the other products each of us buys during our weekly shop and you realise that popping to your local supermarket is a task that needs significant mental effort. And this is even before we attempt to work out which prices or special offers provide the best value for money.

If all this choice is bad for us, then how has it come to pass? Adcock goes on to explain. “Again, the mismatch is rooted in the ways our brains work. Essentially, we simply can’t mentally process the 21st century: there’s just too much to take in. For example, according to the International Journal of Communication, each of us consumes a staggering 34 GB (105,000 words) on an average day — and this excludes work-related data! The amount of information we each receive has increased more than five-fold since the mid-eighties.”

So our poor defenceless brains, designed to choose between red and green berries, have to adopt strategies to manage what information they process. As a result, they take shortcuts — big ones! Ask a shopper what they want from their local supermarket and many will default to the least mentally taxing answer they can come up with: lots of choice and cheaper prices. We have plenty of evidence proving that neither of these responses is actually top of shopper needs, but they are the answers easiest to retrieve from our minds and give to researchers.

Leading retailers and brands love to conduct large research studies during which they talk to hundreds or even thousands of complete strangers (shoppers) and blindly believe every word they say. If it’s all about the widest choice and cheapest price, how come Aldi and Waitrose are both doing so well?

Returning to the subject of choice, shoppers actually prefer less, not more, much of the time. In a series of experiments conducted by Iyengar and Lepper, one group of shoppers was presented with six different flavours of jam, while another encountered a display containing more than 30. 30% of those shopping the six-flavour display made a purchase, compared with just 3% that bought from the much larger display of 30 flavours.

In summary, our brains take shortcuts in 21st century. Scientists and researchers know this. The problem remains that there are too many out there collecting misleading consumer and shopper interview data; whether the data is valid or not appears of secondary importance. The world of retail would be a much better place if those in charge of gathering and disseminating information concentrated on getting the right answers to research questions, instead of settling for getting ‘any old answer, right now’!

Having explained why it is that we don’t and in actual fact can’t make the best decisions in supermarkets, Adcock goes on the reveal some depressing insights regarding how our brains tackle the issue of prices and special offers that bombard us in the supermarket. “Around one in five products in some supermarkets is on special offer. Presuming you spend around 40 minutes doing your big weekly shop, then you could be exposed to four different special offer messages every second in-store! No way can your brain ‘do the math’, as they say in America.”

Once again, we are forced to take mental shortcuts just to be able to make any bit of sense of what we are faced with. Our brains have again adapted to help with this, but alas, not in a way that offers us the best value for money in the supermarket.

Have you ever stopped to consider what phrases like ‘bulk purchase’ or ‘manager’s special’ actually mean? Instinctively, we’ve been conditioned to believe that there is some form of added value. But is there? Often, the answer is unfortunately not.

Then there is the large imposing pallet of a particular product that greets you as soon as you get to the entrance of the supermarket. This will be supported by some form of special offer message — ‘Pinot Grigio wine, was £9.99, now £6.99’, for example. As shoppers, we tend to respond by snapping up such a ‘great deal’, when what we should do is seek out the context. Find other similar products and see how much they are. Frankly, we are much less aware than we think of knowing how much products are and how much they should be. Frequently, supermarket price wars are in fact just price skirmishes. Although Asda and Tesco reduced the price of 3057 items in a 10-week period since February 2014, they increased the prices of more than 3600 items (Daily Mail, 12 May 2014).

Whatever the rights and wrongs of price cuts and price increases, remember that the typical supermarket contains around 50,000 lines, so cutting the price of 3000 means that 94% of products (the remaining 47,000) do not get any cheaper.

To combat this further example of human mental frailty, we need to understand what’s actually happening between our own ears. The rational part of the brain, the most recently evolved neo cortex, is there to think twice before we make instinctive decisions, such as buying that buy one, get one free cat food before realising that you don’t have a cat. Unfortunately, this regulatory part of our brain is relatively weak in its processing ability. Much more persuasive and powerful is the emotional part the brain, which, according to Geoffrey Miller in his book Must Have, operates 3000 times faster and is five times more persuasive than rational thought.

To summarise, when our modern brain is occupied (calculating prices, special offers, comparing brands, etc), it has to hand much of the decision-making over to our emotional brain — a part of the brain that relies on instinct and is much more concerned with immediate gain. It pays little or no attention to any consequences or future problems. This is one reason why we make so many poor value decisions in the supermarkets. We let our emotions decide what’s best for us in terms of value for money. The same emotions that have been evolving for millions of years — much longer than money, which is a relatively recent invention, being just a few thousand years old.

If you want to take back some control over how you decide what represents value in the supermarket, you simply have to involve the more modern parts of your brain. For example, always use a shopping list and, more importantly, have the prices next to the products. Ingeniously, the supermarkets give you this very list inclusive of prices: it’s called last week’s till receipt.

Did you know that the human brain is responsible for using around 20% of all the energy we each consume? Thinking is hard work! So when you are out there trying to save money, make sure you prepare your brain beforehand by consuming energy-releasing foods before a trip to the shops. Don’t shop tired and don’t shop hungry.

Finally, consider this much-overlooked statistic: the average wage in the UK is around £12.50 per hour (Daily Mirror, 9 January 2014). The average weekly spend on a supermarket big shop is £98 (Guardian, 11 December 2013). So if you save any more than 10% off your grocery bill, then your shopping time has been more financially productive than going to work.

Image credit: ©Minerva Studio/Dollar Photo Club