Meijer is pushing the envelope again (Wal-Mart watch out). Instead of being content to only show it’s online visitors the 300 or so circular advertised sale items, they are now exposing nearly every price markdown (both permanent and temporary) within their online weekly ad site. This equates to for the store I am looking at currently an additional 5,045 items. Wow. That’s a serious shot of sale content for shoppers.
This additional sale content is completely store centric (so single store level versioning) and gets refreshed on a daily basis. All of this content is currently only available by either keyword search or browse by categories. The presentation of this content is not ideal, but has continued to steadily improve over the last month on a regular basis. The biggest three issues that the teams at both companies continue to work through are missing images, no browse by brand inclusion and how to adjust the site navigation and browse tools to better help users sift through this large chunk of content.
However even with these short term improvement areas, this IS the future of internet distributed, store based promotions. Let me say it another way. Meijer is thinking long term when there may not be a weekly circular. They are looking to change the game of not being print circular reliant as the only advertising vehicle that can promote what is on sale at a local store. Or at very least, this approach breaks a few major issues of being tied to print only promotions such as:
- Being able to make price changes at any time
- Being able to add or remove promoted items based upon local store inventory changes
- Being able to promote a much deeper and wider set of products than the typical 24 page, 200 item weekly ad contains
- Being able to update any part of a specific deal at any point in time
All of the content that appears with the "price drop" image are the non-circular sourced items.
What in the world does:
- Store Coupons
- Local Inventory
- Store Events & Announcements
- Local Promotions
have in common? They are all all local store focused and represent the complete set of resources that would help any in-market shopper. Collectively over the last few months, the team here at ShopLocal has been doing a lot of thinking and discussing where the future of our business is headed. One of the most immediate conclusions is that we need diversify our business well beyond the current focus area of circulars and catalogs. There will be a day were no print circular is created and inserted into newspapers. This is not an immediate threat or doomsday scenario, but just prudent long-term preparedness.
So once the focus is off the circular, our team immediately turned to bring other great store focused sources of content to a more visible nature. Areas like store-level closeouts, coupons and in-store events are just a few examples. The point being, ShopLocal quickly is evolving to become a store focused, promotion based marketing tool, of which the weekly ad / circular content is just one source. This concept is what the team is calling a Shopper Planning Center (working name – still on the hunt for something better – maybe SmartDeals? Suggestions welcome…)
The goals of what a Shopper Planning Center can do for a retailer are:
- Deepen the amount of location specific content by bringing in promotional data from sources that have no current outlet of home on the internet (including retailer.com)
- Become more multi-channel in terms of offering items available for sale online
- Manage all of this increased volume of content by the use of data driven features such as site personalization, product recommendation and related products
- Do all of this so as to increase local, in-store conversions that are fueled by online research and activities
This is a list of some of the potential content / data sources that a retailer could easily load into the Shopper Planning Center.
So the team here at ShopLocal took this vision of a retailer store-centric deal center (or Shopper Planning Center) and came up with two initial visual manifestations.
Here is a Borders Books "Magic Shelf" inspired visualization that the team did for Kohl's of how many unique content sources can be well integrated into an engaging user experience / interface (Ux /Ui). This entire site would be built as a rich internet application (RIA) so that user could pan up, down, left and right to view the various result sets.
Here is a low fidelity wire frame that was done for Best Buy that does a great job of showing how store event content and eCommerce content and weekly ad content can be pulled together with personalization and localization.
Why SmartCircular? It’s a great way to extend the reach and duration of your weekly print promotions to shoppers who may have otherwise missed it. The people who visit online circulars are the serious customers who visit your stores on a regular basis. Of users who view SmartCircular at least once a week, 95% visit the store at least once a month.¹
37,500 SmartCircular shoppers were asked the following:
- Did you read this week’s print circular?
- When did you read the online circular?
1. ShopLocal SmartCircular Benchmark Survey, Q4 2006
(4.00 out of 5)
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(4.50 out of 5)
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