In 2024, consumers spend an average of $174 per visit to a physical store, where 74% of grocery shopping still happens. The average spent per visit is one of the KPIs most directly connected to the profit margin of a retail establishment. Needless to say, there are many approaches a grocery store can try to use in an effort to increase the average amount spent per visit—from creating loyalty programs to optimizing store layouts. However, most of them are quite complicated and often expensive, with a relatively low probability of achieving the desired result.
On the other hand, hosting just four product demos in a store per week each week of the year will easily elevate the average spent per visit by at least 10%. Depending on the category of products sampled and consumer foot traffic, among other factors, an even greater gain may be achieved. You can try this forecasting model to fine-tune the economic impact of this strategy for your specific conditions.
There is plenty of research explaining the impact of in-store sampling on the store’s guest experience, its word-of-mouth marketing implications, and WHY it happens. In this article, I would like to focus on practical aspects of HOW to make it work to achieve expected results.
Every grocery manager is well aware of the old and tired in-store demo. Even though a demo has the potential to sell a bunch of products once in a while, only a few organizations realize that an on-going stream of in-store sampling events generates a consistent and measurable impact on their profitability.
Perhaps the reason grocery managers fail to appreciate the strategic value of experiential marketing is that they are exposed to vendor’s requests for hosting the demos in their stores as a random tactical event. Moreover, this event requires the logistical effort of their overextended staff without any executive support. Additionally, since there is no mechanism to track the demo performance, they have no idea how it affects the store's profits.
The grocery executives, on the other hand, are rarely exposed to the fact that the marketing strategy based directly and entirely on the vendor's funding can impact the corporate profitability measurably. Instead, they are sold on investing in technologies like retail media and smart shelves.
From the strategic perspective, in-store demo marketing is a very low-hanging fruit that requires minimal, if any, investment and barely any business process changes to yield easily measurable results.
Step 1: Outreach. Many local and national vendors are willing to spend money in your stores to activate their brands with your shoppers and to accelerate the sales velocity of their products. They want to do it because it secures the shelf space in your stores, which was very difficult and expensive for vendors to get. Invite them proactively to showcase their products on schedule and during store special market events and assure them that no competing products will be promoted at the time of their samplings. Considering the fact that an average supermarket carries over 30 thousand products, it should not be too difficult to find enough vendors to fill the desired schedule of events.
Step 2: Logistics. Most retailers have no appreciation of the efforts required from the vendors to schedule and coordinate each event with every store. The overhead of 35%-40% is often reported. The stores that deploy technology automating the demo logistics see an increased number of in-store demos, i.e., more sales.
Step 3: Brand ambassadors. Since vendors pay for all expenses associated with the in-store demos, they manage people who conduct the demos. Not necessarily because they want to, but because they have to. Remote recruitment, training, and management of brand ambassadors is a very difficult challenge, while the quality of these people is fundamentally critical to the success of the event. One way of meeting this challenge is to create a code of conduct during a demo in your store and have every vendor’s commitment to acknowledge and enforce it with their brand ambassadors. An even better solution is to help the vendors find local, high-quality brand ambassadors to promote their products in your stores.
Step 4: Reporting and Analytics. Most vendors require brand ambassadors to report post-demo sales and other relevant information, but these reports are very rarely shared or validated with their retail partners. Moreover, retailers have no mechanisms to provide their feedback to the vendors about their experience with the demo efficacy.
All these steps are relatively simple and inexpensive to implement in a one- or two-location grocery store by dedicating half of the store’s FTE. However, trying to do it in a larger number of locations without technology designed specifically to support this strategy becomes unmanageable pretty quickly. Grapevine Marketing Solutions offers a self-funded operational partnership combining its proprietary technology and operational know-how for scaling in-store demo marketing programs to qualified grocery retailers. Contact me to inquire about specifics.
