Besides the operational requirements to run a national retail food and grocery business, the real battle is for the mind of the consumers or shoppers. These fair weathered friends shop wherever they want, with whomever and walk from one store to the next, week in and week out. They change their minds and, if retailers do not consistently remind them of whom and where they are, they may not come back - store-by-store, mall-by-mall or area by area.
John Bowles, joint MD at NAB, Caxton's division responsible for rolling out the survey explains, "When you travel to 115 urban suburbs and towns across South Africa, you start to pick up some interesting information. The main insight is that area by area shoppers shop differently, they shop at different stores, cross shop at competing stores and won't travel too far for their food and groceries."
The survey has become a tool for retailers who are keen to understand shoppers around their catchment areas. For food and grocery chains, it is a perfect measure to see where potential buyer's minds are thinking of shopping. From the latest results, it is very clear that the battle for this mind is most certainly on the ground.
Most surveys give you the big picture and this one can provide one with the 'overall' position but Bowles urges marketers to be careful of 'big picture' positions. Bearing in mind that the survey measured heads of household from urban brick and mortar households across South Africa, the top food and grocery destinations look something like this:
Shoprite is the biggest puller of traffic in urban South Africa, as 50.4% of purchasing decision makers fully or partly responsible for food and grocery shopping have been into Shoprite in the past month. This is followed by Pick n Pay Supermarkets (45%), Spar (28%) and Checkers close behind on 27%.
However, that is not where the real picture unfolds. For example, Shoprite is in a much better position in some areas and hardly a player in other key hotspots, as indicated below.
"From the table above, Shoprite's dominance and weaknesses are clearly visible. From appealing to 94% of shoppers in Soshanguve, it sways completely the other way to 3% in Fourways," says Bowles.
"Perhaps it does not have a store in Fourways but in areas such as Vanderbijlpark, (where it has stores) its position is shared amongst all the players leaving an opportunity for Shoprite to be more visible amongst potential shoppers. In fact in that area, Pick n Pay Hypermarket has the pole position in the mind of the food and grocery decision maker.
"When one analyses the research statistics, one gets a feel for how tough the marketing job is. Retailers should be excited about their dominance in some areas and concerned about their weakness in others. On the one hand, they may lie awake at night thinking about how they can protect their share of mind in the strongholds, but they are also pondering how they are going to move up the repertoire list in the weaker areas. The battle for the mind is truly down on the ground and marketing just got a whole lot harder."
It will certainly be tougher but more exciting too - where the winner takes all. As Sir Terry Leahy of Tesco once said, 'If you want to be the best, you have to be the best local retailer'.
