Grocery stores are overwhelming for men, retailers piloting in-cart recommendations based on loyalty card history
Snippets from the article:
- U.S. men are doing more and more grocery shopping but retailers are still not doing much to make the trip any more enticing
- Men do represent a large part of grocery shopping dollars and they aren’t being very well accommodated … sales are being lost
- Men have difficulty finding items, forego buying rather than risk purchasing a substitute for an item on the grocery list and hesitate to ask for help if they can’t find an item
- Unlike women, male shoppers typically focus more on convenience than price, and retailers will need to cater to that
- The Shopping Buddy, a wireless computer on shopping carts alerts shoppers to certain items they might want using information from shopper loyalty cards
- Unlike women, men tend to hone in on the specific thing they want to buy instead of surveying the entire aisle… can be a problem for manufacturers and retailers trying to promote new products
- Great at picking out the stuff that they bought before. It’s the new stuff, or something new and different that a manufacturer is trying to promote, that they have trouble with
- Men also tend to bristle at the overwhelming number of choices in grocery aisles, with the cereal aisle being one prime example
- “One guy I thought was going to have a nervous breakdown in the cereal aisle,” Putnam said, adding that this man, in his early 30s, worked the night shift as a police officer in a dicey part of town and was otherwise used to stressful situations.
- Retailers still refer to their main customer as “she,” with women still doing the majority of the family shopping, so a major overhaul of stores to make them more attractive to men is not likely.
- But food retailers in general are focusing more and more on segmentation — tailoring store offerings to shoppers most likely to shop there or that they want to attract. This strategy could attract more male shoppers.
