Retail Location Strategy
The Call
Our retail client’s portfolio included well-known grocery chains as well as smaller market stores and quick-service restaurants, each with a unique assortment of products. They knew a pain point in their shoppers’ lives was making trips to several different stores to fulfill their weekly shopping needs. They wanted to improve the customer experience and capture more spend so they sought to consolidate consumer shopping trips by placing a smaller market with mass brands next to their specialty grocery store. They called on Catapult Insights to study shoppers’ perceptions and experiences shopping at one or both co-located stores to understand the extent to which this strategy encouraged increased shopper engagement and helped to simplify their weekly shopping trips.
Our Response
We designed a qualitative approach which stationed our researchers at the client’s co-located stores about 4 weeks after the grand opening. Our work included a mix of pre-recruited interviews, intercept interviews among shoppers, and observation to better understand how shoppers considered and engaged with each location. This granted us a holistic view of consumer perceptions and thought processes that naturally occur as people become aware of the stores’ proximity to each other and the extent to which co-location weighed on decisions to shop.
The Celebration
Our research determined that co-locating stores next to each other resonates as a concept, but in reality, shoppers needed assistance seeing the potential of making two stops on a single shopping trip. Shoppers in this area were accustomed to shopping multiple stores to fulfill all of their needs, and our client’s strategy was asking them to break natural, routinized behaviors if it were to be successful sourcing trip missions from competitors. Our recommendations highlighted key messaging, merchandising, and selection optimizations that would help shoppers more easily choose to shop both of our client’s stores over competitors. We were able to share many of these insights the same day our fieldwork concluded, which allowed our client to make immediate decisions to boost conversions. Our client was also able to make shifts in their long-term store strategy, including adjustments to product placement and targeted communication with customers to ultimately provide faster identification of benefits to encourage the necessary behavioral change among shoppers.