In their desire to get closer to the consumer, suppliers and retailers are investing in new initiatives; suppliers via DTC partly as a way of diluting the mults’ gatekeeper influence in the market, but more importantly following Lockdown, to discover first-hand the shopping behaviour drivers of the newly emerging super-savvy consumer.
Meanwhile, Amazon’s new 4-star stores, selling its most popular products, has to be a way of assessing the real nature of the super-savvy consumer changing shopping behaviour within a bricks & mortar environment to one of the most consumer-centric retailers of all time…
Many suppliers and retailers are aware that coping with the fallout from the 2008 global financial crisis has caused surviving consumers to become more savvy. However, consumers’ new appetites for demonstrable value for money have taken on added significance in a post-Lockdown world…
Whilst many are shell-shocked from 18 months of domestic internment, they have developed increasing confidence in their common sense when making purchasing decisions. And those who still have jobs are working longer and harder, and possibly for less money, possibly distracted by these ongoing concerns with just living…
But for sure they are becoming super-savvy. This emerging super-savvy consumer has evolved from the combination of the mobile, social, cloud and big data developments in most markets, accelerated by Lockdown. They have developed a healthy cynicism, a heightened sense of right & wrong, an innate appetite for fair share, with Lockdown adding a new urgency and a need to look after their own interests. In the process, trust has become a very scarce commodity…
This is in turn is driving business and personal expenditure like never before. In practice, this increasing use of technology and information is helping to shift the balance of power away from retailers and suppliers to the super-savvy consumer, and is providing them with unprecedented influence over price and choice in the process.
Welcome to the new super-savvy consumers, the professional shoppers, discerning buyers who are simply seeking to obtain satisfaction of their needs in an open market, at a price that compares well with alternatives available, based upon simple but tech-assisted common sense. This represents a real opportunity for the good guys.
If this seems like more doom and gloom, then we are simply not expressing it properly. In fact, we believe that the emergence of the super-savvy consumer is the most positive and exciting social development of the continuing cash crisis and its post-Lockdown accelerator.
In practice, super-savvydom means that the consumer is providing an entirely new basis for suppliers to re-evaluate every SKU in their portfolios against available alternatives, and ruthlessly eliminate anything that does not clearly demonstrate a total match with latest consumer need, made available in a way that shoppers want to buy, better than the competition, with evidence all round of private label flourishing at the expense of brand deficiencies.
It follows that our customer portfolio has to be re-assessed from the same point-of-view, again with the aim of identifying and cultivating trading partners that are capable of expressing the brand offering in a way that can meet super-savvy consumer-shopper needs at point-of-sale, profitably. Culling is but the first step…
Despite having so much at stake in terms of simply competing post-Lockdown for the super-savvy consumer’s custom vs. available alternatives, suppliers may be tempted to resort to shrinkflation as a means of absorbing the increasing costs of labour, ingredients, and energy. In doing so, they are ignoring the fact that even before lockdown, shrinkflation was a crime committed against their most loyal consumer – a regular user that knew the brand better than anyone, and one well-positioned to recognise any reduction in pack contents, and skilled enough to measure the resulting price increase in terms of reduced value for money. Post-Lockdown, with super-savvy consumers in the mix, such ‘short-changing’ of a loyal consumer, our best customer, beggars belief…
We are now living through the evolution of a tech-assisted common-sense approach to buying goods and services by increasingly informed consumers, who are prepared to vote with their feet and tell their friends…
This is a development that will challenge traditional marketing and selling practices but will also provide significant opportunities for those suppliers and retailers that are prepared to go back to basics, factor this new post-Lockdown reality into their product offerings, and constantly strive to exceed consumer expectation by always delivering more than it says on the tin, 24/7.
A primary ingredient in the process is trust, ever more important in a world where government attempts at ‘levelling-up’ are perceived by many consumer-voters as levelling-down in practice. Your call…
