Eric Le Blanc
Published articles
Brand building: How to create deeper connections with today’s grocery customers
(5 min read) Tyson Foods’ Eric Le Blanc, Director of Marketing for Deli, believes that addressing consumers’ essential concerns (rather than the fleeting ones) is the way to sell more prepared foods and groceries.
In this Q&A, we asked him how he learns about those concerns, how they are connected to selling more stuff, and how Tyson is applying these insights in-store and online.
You’re clearly an innovative marketer, what sets your work apart?
Eric Le Blanc – We’re just working hard to do our job and learn about how we can interact in more meaningful ways with consumers. As you know, most of the emphasis in grocery marketing is transactional – how can we sell more people more stuff.
Of course, that’s important. It makes our world go round, but we believe we can do that in a more helpful way, in a better way, and in a way that delivers more value by addressing consumers’ essential concerns instead of the fleeting ones like “busyness.”
How do you figure out what customers’ “essential concerns” are?
ELB – That’s the journey we’re on, and we continue to learn. They say if you want to get the same answers, ask the same questions, so we use a variety of other methods: observation, discovery through activities, storytelling, drawing pictures – then we watch and see what happens.
We did a year-long project observing families that included weekly activities, weekly visits by researchers, and we deliberately put the families in touch with each other to create a community. We started with a question, “What is the role of food in your life?” and by the end of the year we observed that their essential concerns and ideas were very different from how they articulated them in the beginning.
Sometimes we learn what we call “Forrest Gump Insights,” because they sound so obvious. For example, when we asked people, “Why did you buy these particular, prepared foods today?” the most common answer we got was, “Because I saw it.”
Not surprising – but too often we don’t pay attention when the answer seems commonplace. This answer told us that prepared food purchases are often more spontaneous than planned, which has big implications for where to locate prepared food sections and how to merchandise them.
A good part of what we’re doing involves starting with some basic listening, and then going deeper to learn what’s essential. It’s digging like this that helps us realize many shoppers don’t have much understanding of what’s available, and limited ideas about how to put it together in a good meal for their family. This is where we start getting closer to what’s essential.
How do you translate connecting with the consumer on the essential issues with “selling them more stuff”?
ELB – This is where it gets interesting. Let me explain.
We know from our work that consumers are unsure about what to buy for their families, and in a lot of ways, the grocery store can be a confusing embarrassment of riches. We also know that when people know how to use something, they use it more often and enjoy it more.
People, however, rarely ask questions when they grocery shop. For example, we did a study of deli customers in which most showed signs of confusion, but only 3% voluntarily asked questions about what to buy and how to use it. The eye-opener? 97% of those who DID ask accepted the guidance that was offered.
We recently worked with a food retailer who has a pretty good reputation for prepared foods, but whose sales for the department were declining. The only thing we changed was the in-store communications around prepared foods, with the aim of educating and inspiring. The result was a 12-percentage point shift in sales for prepared food products.
People thirst for information, and when they get it, they feel better about themselves and feel better about the brand. This is the opportunity to make meaningful connections – to educate and inspire, to become a trusted advisor – and to sell more.
When people become more comfortable with food, they do more with it, and they will buy more at the grocery store and eat at home more often.
More education and inspiration increase the purchases of prepared foods. Does this apply to the rest of the store too?
ELB – Sure, this is about a lot more than prepared foods. It’s about the consumer learning more about how they can use a product.
As I said, when you know more about something, you’ll use it more and enjoy it more. That’s what we see happening here. And when it happens, the person or organization that does the teaching begins to be accepted as a trusted advisor. That’s when the interaction becomes meaningful and delivers value over and above the transaction.
The possibility of becoming a trusted advisor is really powerful, but a lot of organizations don’t seek this relationship with consumers.
How are you putting these new insights to work in your business?
ELB – People need (and want) a coach, but given today’s operating budgets, that’s not going to happen, so we developed a kiosk that’s a surrogate for that person. The kisok is named Olive. She has a personality, and she’ll ask you questions – like,
- How many people are you feeding?
- Do you want a light touch or hands-on?
- What kind of cuisine are you interested in?
Then she offers you three options and will email or text you the ingredients and instructions you’ll need.
There’s no selling or promoting, Olive is just there to help. It’s not perfect, but we’re encouraged by what we’re seeing so far, and we’re learning all the time.
Do you see similar opportunities to provide meaningful interactions with customers before they get to the store?
ELB – Absolutely. People are making all kinds of decisions outside of the store. The challenge is how to do it in a way that’s unobtrusive, not scary, and that integrates with their lives.
For example, take 4pm. Many consumers say that at 4pm they still don’t know what’s for dinner, and the conventional industry wisdom is that this is stressful, so the industry often markets toward alleviating stress.
But, we’ve found just the opposite; a lot of consumers experience this as a sign of freedom and empowerment. They aren’t stressed about planning in the way we typically assume; rather, they are asking themselves “What do I feel like eating tonight?”
Helping a consumer solve an important problem or satisfy a desire like “What do I feel like eating tonight?” reflects well on our business. It’s best done face-to-face, but today most people consult a digital source first.
Our challenge is how to meet the consumer with the information or inspiration they need, when they need it, on a device and platform they are comfortable with. These are questions we are working to answer, and I’m sure we’re not alone.
The Deli Diet: A New Way to Look at the Industry
I’m going to write a book hyping my new diet plan—I may call it something like “The Obvious Diet.” It’s been clinically proven to work. Here it is: Eat right and exercise. The only tough part is eating right and exercising. And finding something else to put in the book to justify the $34.99 I intend to charge for it.
In the world of prepared foods/retail foodservice, I have an equally simple formula: Educate, Inspire and Execute. It’s guaranteed to create double-digit sales increases. It’s proven. The only hard part is educating, inspiring and executing. I’ll come back to this.
As a recovering retailer myself, I have heard many of the sayings that have been passed down from merchant to merchant through the years. Here’s one: You can’t sell from an empty cart. That’s got to be good for an eye roll, right? C’mon—everyone knows that! Rotisserie chicken and fried chicken—together forming a large percentage of prepared foods sales—are out of stock 10-11 percentof the time at peak meal periods. Back when Noah got off the ark and I was running stores we had what we called NBOs—Never Be Out. Every department had a limited number of SKUs that you should never be out of stock on. An example might be Prego Traditional Sauce—or bananas. If you had NBOs in prepared foods, surely rotisserie and fried chicken would be counted among them. Yet there is that pesky out-of-stock rate. Why does it happen? We all know why: not enough labor, too much shrink, and sometimes not enough production capacity. So that’s hard. Like eating right. But it’s something we need to acknowledge and address.
How about this bit of wisdom, once published in a trade mag as “LeBlanc’s Law” (Mom was so proud). The No. 1 reason shoppers buy a prepared foods item when they hadn’t planned on shopping the category is…wait for it…because they saw it. That’s a dissertation right there. OK, LeBlanc, we all know that. Of course we do. Walk into an average supermarket deli and see how far the deli department is from the racetrack. Usually pushed up against a wall, no? That’s a violation of LeBlanc’s Law, and Mom doesn’t like it.
“You only have one chance to create a first impression.” Well, the reality is that as an industry we have a pretty horrible failure rate: 48 percent of deli prepared foods shoppers have experienced a failure (product, service or general issues) in the past 90 days. That failure rate means that at any given time 20 percent of your potential deli prepared foods shoppers are not shopping your store. That means those shoppers are not crossing your threshold for a period of time and you are losing the whole trip.
Consumers are looking for…fill in your favorite. Rotisserie chicken is something I think about quite a lot because it’s convenient. All five of the top drivers of purchase intent relate to the sensory attributes of the product: appears that it will taste good, smells good, etc. What that means is substandard cheap and convenient food ain’t gonna cut it—it’s got to taste good. We all know that. Well, are we telling shoppers that the food tastes great? For the most part, no. We’re talking about a thing and a price.
Which leads me back to Educate and Inspire. The consumer electronics industry was having a terrible time with returns on products that did not do what the consumer expected them to do. There are some problems with that. One, restock costs. Two, the consumer’s perception of the manufacturer suffers in the mind of the consumer and the perception of the retailer declines as well. What the industry has attempted to do is to provide more information on the package and on the shelf explaining to the consumer what each product does, how to use it, and what other products are needed to make it work. Oh, so you need to know how to use something in order to enjoy using it? Everyone knows that. OK, how well do we, as an industry, tell people how to use our prepared foods products? That’s a meal. And a meal isn’t a rotisserie chicken, a beverage, and two tired sides. There’s a lot of fresh food in a supermarket that could take that center of the plate item and make it look and taste fantastic. People just need to be given some ideas. Simple, right? Just like exercising. Simple.
What if I said that in a two-store test where Tyson Foods’ people went into a store and cooked rotisserie chickens—this was a one-week test in each store—sales increased more than 40 percent. You can’t sell from an empty cart.
What if I said that mobile warmers near the checkout are shopped by nearly twice the number of consumers as in the department? People need to see it.
What if I said that simply changing from a product focus to a meal focus and utilizing existing digital and social media to promote prepared foods generated 12 percentage points in growth in a 90-day period? If you know how to use it, you’ll enjoy using it more.
It’s easy to do. The hard part is doing it.
I’ve talked about a lot of complicated and difficult things as though they are simple. Like eating right and exercising. They’re not simple. And it’s not for retailers alone to solve these issues. Suppliers and retailers need to work together to find solutions. In every part of our lives there are those things we know we should do, but somehow, they don’t happen as regularly as we would like. It’s the human condition.
In the coming months I’m going to talk about the human condition—about deli on a human scale. I’m going to talk about the entire shop and consumption journey—not from a category management perspective, but from a human perspective. And in the process, I hope to spend some time considering simple truths that we may need to look at from a different—human—perspective.
What Shoppers Really Need During the 4:00 PM Dinner Dilemma
It’s 4 p.m. and 70 percent…no…75 percent…maybe 85 percent of Americans don’t know what’s for dinner tonight. The actual number depends a great deal on which recent study you’re looking at. Accuracy aside, the consensus opinion is that at 4 p.m., lots of people don’t know what’s for dinner that night. In fact, in a study we did a while back, 27 percent of deli prepared foods shoppersdid not decide what was for dinner that night until someone said, “I’m hungry.” I love that.
There may be less consensus, however, on what exactly that means. The assumption is that consumers have fear and anxiety over this horrible situation of not knowing what they’re going to eat until the last moment. So, given that assumption, we create solutions and communications that target “convenience” and “ease.” I suspect those words hardly have any meaning left in them as a result of how overused they are.
What if we looked at it a different way? We just completed a study in partnership with Technomic and found that only 4 percent of our sample found the 4 p.m. “dilemma” stressful. Hmm. That’s not what we were all saying. What if the ability to put off a decision until the last moment were NOT a sign of a failure in our domestic management, but rather an expression of freedom, affluence, and choice? What if we wait until the last minute to choose because we CAN? A few examples:
- When you were a kid, did you ever come home after a big day outside only to find that Mom had made a dinner that was not even a little bit like the one you would have chosen? No? Well how about this one:
- A meal service has struggled with retaining users. Anecdotally, customers expressed that they did not like the pressure of having something in their refrigerator that they HAD to eat before it went bad. I picture the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come pointing to the refrigerator with a skeletal finger while some poor soul exclaims, “Spirit, are these the shadows of meals that must be or those that may be only?” It’s the sort of thing you’d want clarity on if a spirit were pointing a skeletal hand at YOUR refrigerator.
- In an experiment we did with a number of families, we followed them through seven consecutive dinners, trying to capture that “why” behind their choices at dinner times. We wanted to see a range of dinner solutions—cook at home, delivery, dine-in, etc. What we found (and this was qualitative, so I don’t want to speak beyond my evidence) is that most often people would consider the “what” before the “where.” For example, I feel like Chicken Pad Thai. OK, where do you want to get it?
What if it’s empowering to be able to say, “I don’t know, let’s get…” I don’t have to eat what Mom made, I don’t have to eat what I ordered. I get to choose. That should change the way we talk about it, right? Instead of talking about the burden, maybe we talk about something like this: “You’ve got the freedom to do what you want for dinner—how do you want to embrace that freedom tonight?” Well, maybe that’s not very good, but consider this. When a manufacturer of a luxury performance car advertises their car, the pitch line is not, “Whew. Driving is such a chore. But if you have to force yourself to drive, this car isn’t the worst choice.” I think the pitch is about how cool it is to experience this car and the freedom of the road. Big difference, no?
One last reason why I believe the 4 p.m. thing is not a problem: if it were, we would have fixed it by now.
Let’s pretend we’re one of the 27 percent and someone just said, “I’m hungry.” What now? There are two issues to be confronted: where do deli prepared foods rank in the consideration set, and how much friction is there in procuring the food? Let’s take the first one first—there seems to be some kind of logic in that.
Where is our channel in the consumer’s consideration set? From what I’ve been able to tell in my years of working on this business, not very high. What does the marketing gobbledygook mean? When people try to answer “I’m hungry,” deli isn’t the first thing people think of. Or the second. Or the third. Maybe fourth. Or fifth. Like that. So, that’s an issue of awareness and there are two ways of handling that: one is by increasing our effectiveness in using out-of-store communication (which, by the way, we have usedto increase a retailer’s prepared foods sales by 15 percent in 90 days). The other is in ensuring that today’s experience of procuring and consuming the meal is one they would like to repeat. Let’s talk about the latter.
I think we forget—or maybe just don’t realize—what a large and confusing place a supermarket is. The deli/prepared foods area only more so. In a study we did a few years back, we found that a large number of shoppers exhibited signs of confusion. That’s what the ethnographers said. I know that in at least one case I saw a shopper scratch his head as he pondered a case full of deli meat. Anyway—here’s the point: of those that were confused, only 4 percent asked for assistance. That’s a lot of people walking around your store that are leaving just as confused as they came in. And confused means dissatisfied. But the amazing thing is, of those that asked for assistance, 87 percent accepted the advice they were given! So here is the vision for the day: hungry shoppers looking for dinner and around their necks they wear a sign that says tell me what to do and I’ll do it. That’s quite an opportunity.
The shopper has a need. It’s a deep need about their freedom, their empowerment, and the others in their lives. How do we meet them in their need? If we’re like most marketers, we will do our best to manipulate them. OR we could choose to meet people in their need and be a trusted advisor to them, helping them to feel smart and strong. What a difference that is from trying to build a relationship on the basis of product and price.
Next month I’ll talk about the shopping trip and how it can better serve the shopper in their need.
Eric LeBlanc 