About two years ago, a New Zealander shopping at one of the major supermarket chains would have been “attacked” by the massed battalions of the supermarket’s own labels, displaying products ranging from bread, dairy items and healthy food to spreads and hand wash liquid soap.
They were not exactly cheap stuff, but increasingly segmented into things like ready meals, “healthy” options or pricey treats. Confronting them were goods from branded manufacturers, which must pay for the privilege of appearing in the grocery department. And surrounding everything are shelves heaving with personal-care products, clothing, books and DVD recorders.
Even if you can resist the smell of fresh bread from the in-store bakery, other forms of psychological warfare would have enticed you to spend more than you intended. Dairy products, which most people buy regularly, tend to be lined up at the back of the store, so shoppers have to pass along the aisles where temptation can be put their way.
Positioning is everything: people typically spend at most a minute selecting a grocery item, and if they cannot find it, they would move on to something else. The best slots are at adult eye-level, so that is where relatively expensive products are put, often to the right of popular items (to increase the chances that right-handed shoppers will pick them up). Price is not always the deciding factor: more than half the people leaving a supermarket cannot recall exactly what they paid for individual items.
Not any longer. Today, the average customer is sensitive to price increases and has a keen eye for goods that are sold at low prices.
According to Consumer Affairs, ordinary New Zealanders do not compromise quality but would certainly seek better value for money.
Which is why supermarkets such as Food 4 Less have registered impressive growth in a comparatively short time
Established six years ago first in Otahuhu and last year in New Lynn, Food 4 Less is a one-stop-shop for everyone’s daily need of fruits, vegetables, meat, fish, grocery, beverages, rice, wheat and a host of other items.
There are so many items on offer that all you need is a list of items that you would need for the week. You would easily find what you are looking for.
With so much choice, why don’t shoppers simply ignore brands and make a purely rational, economic decision about what to buy?
“Because that is not human nature,” says a marketing expert.
“Brands offer trust and they enable people to navigate through complex markets.” There is something in that. In the old Soviet Union, where all products were supposed to be the same, consumers learnt how to read barcodes as substitutes for brands in order to identify goods that came from reliable factories.
Consumer-goods companies invest in brands to convince supermarkets to stock their products and to get shoppers to buy them. To keep in touch with their customers, consumer-goods companies are shifting their spending away from traditional media, such as network TV and print, to other types of promotion.
These almost always include sampling on site at supermarkets.
