Pandemic Behaviors That Are Here to Stay
Nick Minnick is the VP of Strategic Partnerships here at Chicory, the contextual commerce advertising platform.
In order to ensure success in 2021 and beyond, it’s essential for brands and retailers to understand the changed consumer behaviors that have staying power. Besides the unprecedented increases in online grocery adoption, here are a few COVID-19-related grocery shopping trends that have long-term staying power.
In-Store Safety and Cleanliness Will Be a Must-Have
While shoppers in the Northeast get a kick out of Stop & Shop’s autonomous robot, Marty, notifying employees to clean up spills and other messes, cleaning robots may not be taken so lightly anymore. Safety and cleanliness in stores will be a requirement, and no longer a “nice to have'' to maintain shoppers. There’s already an increased focus on features such as enhanced cleaning procedures, permanent shields at registers and touch-free checkout, with Amazon Go leading the helm by going totally cashier-less. Self-serve salad bars may be a thing of the past as stores bring back prepared foods in pre-packaged form, particularly as consumers tire of at-home cooking. Old stories resurfacing like the man drinking soup directly from the self-serve hot foods bar at a Chicago supermarket, will not be as amusing in the post-pandemic world and will impact where shoppers make their purchases.
Appealing to a New Generation of Home Chefs
This pandemic created a new generation of chefs, as many consumers who had no cooking and baking experience were forced to dive into the deep end and develop new skills. 35% of consumers that are cooking more at home are enjoying it. And as the status of restaurant reopenings and outdoor dining is constantly in flux across the nation, as well as economic uncertainty, consumers will continue to cook at home. This will inevitably drive the immediate need for grocers to focus on meal inspiration, specialty ingredients, fresh foods and perimeter departments as points of differentiation.
Personalization to Maintain Newly Acquired Shoppers
Personalization seemed like old news for grocery retailers. But the swaths of newly acquired grocery ecommerce shoppers (and even new in-store shoppers, who switched grocery retailers at the beginning of the pandemic) will require new personalization strategies, particularly for shoppers who are beginning to explore their own creativity around food for the first time. For ecommerce, tactics like tailored product recommendations and targeted coupons will be critical for grocers to maintain these newly acquired shoppers.
Expect to see retailers finding new avenues to deliver personalized content, similar to offering personalized recipe recommendations based on past purchases, like Shoprite’s The Recipe Shop. By tying personalization to email marketing and web content, particularly with logins to gain first-party data, retailers can also leverage their existing customer communication channels to be more effective at converting customers.
Increased Adoption of Own Brands
Whether driven by product availability or economic factors, shoppers who were resistant to purchasing store brands have discovered their parity in quality and the value they offer. In fact, Chicory’s holiday survey conducted in September 2020 revealed that 17% of consumers planned to choose store brands over national brands this holiday season in order to save money this year. Additionally, 70% of consumers expected to be more price sensitive when shopping for groceries this holiday season. We expect this mindset to continue throughout 2021, as own-brand products become more popular alternatives to their national brand counterparts.
Increased Willingness to Try New Products
Shoppers that were forced to try new items due to out-of-stocks in April and May are now more willing to consider switching brands. In fact, over 70% of consumers have actively looked for new kinds of grocery products and brands during the pandemic and 83% expect to buy these new products again. Particularly as the pandemic bore so many new and curious home chefs, 2021 will be the year for food innovation and discovery in food technology. Plant-based and cell-based meat, alcoholic beverages and unique functional foods will all appeal to new chefs who are eager to experiment.
Fewer, Larger Grocery Shopping Trips
Shoppers who have begun making fewer, larger shopping trips to avoid unnecessary exposure to crowded stores have become accustomed to larger “stock up” trips, reducing the frequency of grocery shopping occasions. As a result, retailers and brands will have less opportunity to reach consumers in-store. However, this leads to new opportunities to market the grocery ecommerce platforms that many retailers bulked up during the pandemic and encourage shoppers to go online for their supplemental grocery needs. Tactics like free grocery pick-up, free shipping over a certain basket size threshold and grocery memberships are all becoming increasingly popular.
Retailers also have the opportunity here to use digital marketing tactics to nurture the shopper relationship and keep top-of-mind awareness in between fewer grocery trips. Email marketing and social media engagement can drive the customer in-store or online, without limiting sales to just ecommerce.
Both brands and retailers must adapt to new long-term behaviors, some of which are vastly different from prior shopping habits. But the challenge is that they must quickly adapt to these behaviors, while also staying nimble enough to pivot quickly as conditions change. Essentially, brands and retailers need to keep an eye out for and accommodate the inevitable shifts that will occur, based on how rapidly the state of the pandemic changes the way consumers shop.
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