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The Key to Ensuring Private Label Success in Grocery Merchandising
Innovation is the driving force of organizational growth, and the grocery industry is no exception. Delivering enticing, relevant product ranges is critical to keeping shoppers engaged and retaining loyalty.
However, research has found that innovation is in short supply. According to research commissioned by the British Brands Group (BBG), just 2.1% of product launches in the last three years are a “true innovation.” So, where are the product ideation, development, and release strategy processes going wrong?
In this article, we’ll discuss the challenges within the grocery merchandising process and how technology can change things.
Why Product Ideation is Getting Harder
Did you know over half of consumers anticipate spending more on groceries in 2024 compared to 2023? Despite consumers spending more, innovation across the food sector worldwide needs to be improved.
For example, the French grocery market saw the number of food sector innovations fall by 20%, a trend that has lasted several years. But why? Here’s a breakdown of the biggest challenges impacting ideation today.
The Unlucky Seven: Private Label Ideation Challenges Grocers Must Overcome
In the case of product ideation today, seven isn’t a lucky number. These seven obstacles stand in the way of true innovation, hampering the go-to-market process from the beginning.
- Market Saturation – The food sector is one of the most saturated, with countless consumer products to choose from. Approximately 73% of consumers said they were overwhelmed by so many choices.
- Consumer Adaption—Determining what each demographic wants and adapting to their changing preferences requires faster product ideation processes, which many brands lack.
- Limited Shelf Space—Supermarkets have only so much physical space. Because every shelf counts, stores require intricate demand forecasting tools to deal with this problem.
- Seasonality—Embracing seasonal product ideation trends helps businesses capitalize on ever-changing markets and consumer behaviors. What works in summer won’t necessarily work in winter, resulting in missed opportunities and wastage.
- Mastering the Supply Chain – A reliance on third party logistics puts product availability and sales opportunity at risk without clear insights into supply chain data to stay ahead of potential issues. Without proper control and agility over the supply chain, supermarkets also risk overstocking and with perishable produce, this can have costly consequences.
- Cost and Pricing – Does a product make financial sense? Consumers are feeling the squeeze and are more likely than ever to select products based on price. For example, the cost of olive oil alone rose by 113.8% between 2019 and 2024. Food and beverage retailers need to stock products in their customers’ affordability range.
- Brand Consistency—Product ideation in private label development must always consider brand consistent product development. Unfortunately, it’s a delicate balancing act between anticipating customer demand and trying to attract footfall from competing stores.
These obstacles illustrate the potential for blunders within the product ideation and planning process. Any one of them can result in massive and immediate missed opportunity costs.
Turning Products into Bestsellers Through Intelligent Promotion Planning
How can private label product development teams ensure their newly developed product will become a customer favorite? With so much choice, poor promotional strategies may result in an otherwise fantastic product flopping.
Again, go-to-market execution for any product raises its own challenges, including:
- Create buying volume aggregation to reduce cost, optimize inventory and negotiate better prices.
- Rapidly changing grocery shopping patterns.
- Balancing promotional periods with the risk of understocking/overstocking.
- Inconsistent promotional planning of product ranges.
- Serving an array of customer micro-segments.
- Building consistency across in-store vs. online shopping channels.
- Reliable analyses of consumer demand across multiple geographies and segments.
- Visibility of product, market and campaign data.
Even if you overcome these challenges, the numbers must make sense. Promotions mean discounts and strategists must balance worthwhile discounts in their campaign planning to drive more sales while preserving often razor-thin margins. This equation grows even more complicated when accounting for the role of loss leaders.
Product innovation in supermarkets must rapidly adapt to changing consumer behavior. By focusing on fairer, greener, and more transparent operations, businesses can impress and entice today’s digitally native customers. These customers use their wallets to vote for companies that reflect their core values.
How Centric Solutions Streamlines Your Private Label Success
Most grocers understand the need for data analytics tools to drive their product development and planning processes. Unfortunately, as data volume grows, grocers become less agile. Due to how fast the market moves, it’s never been more challenging (and riskier) to be proactive. Keeping on top of PIFs, marketing data, formulation data and compliance down to building out the product range at store level is no longer feasible with spreadsheets and ERPs. Private label management and FMCG merchandising demands a solution that gives grocers the end-to-end view and control of their strategy and execution.
Centric Software® transforms the entire concept-to-shelf process by harmonizing product and packaging design, development, pricing and promotion data in a single location, allowing teams to stay ahead of crucial roadblocks, streamline operations and boost product margins. With Centric’s AI-powered PLM and Visual Assortment and Concept solutions, grocers can make real-time decisions and optimize ranges and promotional campaigns in a fraction of the time taken traditionally.
- Sandbox product, packaging and campaign ideas across different markets using real-time product and sales data with Centric Visual Boards™.
- Strategize “what-if” scenarios to determine the impact of every decision before committing to production.
- Synchronize campaign and assortment management visually through connected data.
- Quickly pinpoint the products required for seasonal promotions, identify cross-selling opportunities and store overlap.
- See and build product ranges from the customers’ point of view.
The goal is to enhance efficiency while increasing the effectiveness of the data you already hold. Overall, it’s about simplifying the PLM process while improving results. Centric PLM™ and Centric Visual Boards help automate manual tasks and provides remote teams with the digital, collaborative space required to ideate, strategize and utilize real-time customer data to revolutionize product development, create campaigns and launch products in line with customer trends and expectations. With Centric Visual Boards and Centric PLM supermarket brands can empower widespread teams to collaborate on design and product proliferation to speed time to market with products that will sell.
Centric’s investments in next-generation technology, including AI, bolster your capabilities to increase your product strike rate. As competition grows, Centric gets more from your team while accelerating your time to market.