The pleasures of shopping for food.
In any supermarket chain, some things are easy to find. Apples. Milk. Bread. But if you're looking for flaxseeds? Coconut milk? Prunes? Who among us has not felt the stirrings of super-market rage as we crisscross the fluorescent-lit maze of shelves, our shopping carts banging together as we search for a single palatable salami?
"Brands may want engagement and conversations with consumers, but that's not what consumers want."
This is a problem good marketing can solve.
Meijer, a regional market and grocery chain in the United States, has close to two hundred stores in Michigan, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois and Kentucky. Through their seventy-five years, the family-owned business has seen dramatic changes in their retail experience. Their philosophy of "...take care of your customers, team members, and community... and all of those will take care of you, just like a family," sounds earnest enough, but in a world where supercenters and mass retailers are becoming grocers, and local farmer's markets are seeing a resurgence, the pressure to stay competitive and relevant at the local level is intense. While it may not be a silver bullet, the Meijer Find-it app is much more than a store map and couponing engine. Once you have put in your shopping list and chosen your store, the app will order your list to create the most efficient route through the store. If you go off course, the app will self-adjust as you go along.
So why don't more brands do this -- solve the most frustrating problems we experience when we use their product or service?
If you look at the typical diatribe about "marketing being dead" or "advertising being dead," you quickly realize that all solutions talk about the imperative to forge a deeper, more powerful connection with the consumer. In short, brands can create loyalty by being more personable, helpful and likable.
But that's not enough.
Brands may be saying that they want engagement and conversations with consumers, but that's not what consumers want. (Do you really want to "engage" with your grocery store? No. You want to get your food and go home.) Thanks to the Web, any brand can have an idea and publish it to the Web in text, images, audio and/or video. This can be done instantly, free, and immediately. It's pretty amazing. And yet, with this tremendous access and disintermediated channel, what have we gotten? For the most part, a lot of very traditional advertising messages. They may be glitzed up to look like something more than a moment of distraction to sell a consumer on a new product or benefit, but the truth is that the vast majority of brands are still chasing the same advertising model,