Personalized Wellness: A Virtual Dietitian

Healthcare has made valiant efforts to guide consumers to beneficial foods, only to find the information quickly forgotten within hours of leaving the doctor’s office. Understanding nutrition labels on packaged foods has proven to be a formidable barrier to time-starved shoppers in today’s vast supermarkets filled with a dizzying array of thousands of products. To have significant impact, guidance to beneficial foods has to be easy, convenient, and contextual to the shopper and it is only today that we have the technology necessary to do this.

The time is right as the healthcare and food industries are primed for change as traditional business models, practices, and products crumble in the face of financial pressures, profound change in consumer preferences, and technology-fueled innovation. As data from across the healthcare and food industries is increasingly stored in the cloud it is becoming easier to link previously disparate data to power personalized wellness.

Health data: Health records are rapidly becoming digitized and stored in the cloud where they can be used, under HIPAA compliant processes, to inform nutritional recommendations. Beyond this, prescription data can be used (again in HIPAA compliant fashion) to infer a disease state or health condition. Wearable devices are moving beyond activity tracking to provide monitoring of key health indicators. As an example, it is reported that Apple is working on non-invasive glucose monitoring via the Apple Watch. Increasingly, health condition data is becoming available in real-time.

Nutritional requirements: A vast number of peer-reviewed research studies establishing wellness criteria for nutrition-sensitive health conditions are leveraged to drive recommended macronutrients, vitamins, and minerals at a granular level for specific conditions and combinations of conditions.

Beneficial products: The recommended nutrients for a given health condition are then compared to the nutritional data of the tens of thousands of food products available, effectively creating a subset of products across the supermarket that are beneficial to the individual and their health condition.

Purchase data: Shopper-identified purchase data, gathered through retail loyalty programs and online shopping, is used to provide deep insight to a shopper’s food proclivities, brand preferences, preferred package sizes, discount propensity, product purchase frequency, and more, to further refine the subset of beneficial products and make recommendations most likely to be purchased—and provide an improved outcome.

These building blocks—health data, nutritional requirements, beneficial products, and food purchase data—form the foundation of personalized wellness. Understanding which of the 40,000+ products offered by the typical supermarket are beneficial to a given health condition effectively creates a ‘store within a store’ for the shopper. For the shopper with hypertension, personalized wellness filters the tens of thousands of products available to provide the shopper with a subset of beneficial products across the dozens of categories in the store. Further, using sophisticated AI-powered marketing personalization technology, beneficial product recommendations are communicated to the individual shopper that align with the shopper’s expressed preferences in brands, package sizes, flavors, and even purchasing frequency.

A Virtual Dietitian

Customers of Carnival Cruise Lines receive an Ocean Medallion, a wearable device, a week or two prior to departure. The cruise goer is invited to go online and create a profile linked to their wearable which includes any dietary requirements and meal preferences. When on the cruise, the Ocean Medallion acts as a digital room key, digital wallet, and automatically informs the waitstaff in the dining room as to that customer’s dietary requirements, the meal personalized to the individual per the information wirelessly conveyed.

Consumers are already predisposed to a customized shopping experience as they demand the marketing relevancy and personalization experienced online from the brick and mortar retailers they trade with. Retailers like Coborn’s and Foodtown are providing customization in the form of personalized weekly ads and relevant promotions.

Personalized wellness as we envision it provides a concierge service to consumers, a virtual dietitian helping guide them to products beneficial to their health condition as they shop their preferred stores. Rather than an Ocean Medallion, retailers can leverage in-store location technology and the shopper’s smartphone to help guide the shopper to beneficial products while that shopper is in the aisle, drawing on knowledge of the health condition and real-time shopper location in the store. Using the same technology, the retailer can message the shopper with an easy-to-prepare beneficial dinner recipe when the shopper enters the store in the late afternoon in search of dinner that night.

https://www.winsightgrocerybusiness.com/wellness/personalized-wellness-virtual-dietitian

Many Retailers Are Asking the Wrong Question About Personalized Offers

Years ago, I remember some retailers boasting that they had no advertising expense. These retailers were charging brands for ad placement and display fees and then applying the funds collected to the cost of printing and distributing weekly ads. Voila—no advertising costs! Wow, what a great business!

Then Walmart came along and upended the industry with its focus on everyday low prices. Supermarket retailers were up in arms, wondering how Walmart could sell products below cost. Sure, Walmart leveraged their scale and logistics expertise. But Walmart importantly did not play the ad money shell game, instead putting all manufacturer monies into cost of goods.

And now the same cycle is playing out again. Many regional retailers are focused on customer-centric retailing—the practice of using data-driven customer insights to improve product assortment, promotion planning, pricing and marketing personalization. Many of these retailers are seeking to sell data to brand manufacturers, looking to create a new revenue stream while pressuring the brands for incremental offers to feed personalization initiatives.

The challenge of funding personalized offers is universal, and many retailers fall back on a time-tested solution: Get the brand manufacturers to pay for it. Every retailer I talk with about marketing personalization inevitably asks, “Where do I go for incremental offers to power my personalization program?” These retailers are asking the wrong question.

Instead, retailers should be asking how they can better use the existing promotional content they have. There are three key areas retailers should be focused on relative to marketing personalization.

Personalized ad flyer: Rather than force your shoppers to search through hundreds of sale products to find the few that are of interest, retailers should be providing a personalized digital ad to each of their customers. This makes more effective use of existing promotions and helps drive sales by getting the most relevant sale items in front of each individual customer. Retailers doing this include Niemann Foods’ County Market stores, Coborn’s and Foodtown.

Look to TPRs: Every supermarket retailer has hundreds, if not thousands, of products on sale each week as part of a TPR (temporary price reduction) program, and there are two opportunities here. The first is simply getting the most relevant TPR products in front of each individual customer as in the personalized ad flyer above. But there is a more powerful opportunity to implement a hybrid pricing strategy, providing a discount for all shoppers at the shelf, but a deeper discount to shoppers as part of a strategy to grow shopper share of wallet

Look to local and regional vendors: In the Let’s Get Personal: Digital Customer Engagement in Supermarket Retail article,  I spoke to retailers putting in place a digital marketing ecosystem. Looking to County Market again, we see the retailer opening up their digital marketing platform portal to local and regional vendors to create digital offers that are then directed to the most relevant shoppers. Everyone wins as the smaller vendors typically do not have access to sophisticated digital marketing, the customer benefits from additional savings on relevant products, and the retailer gains from additional content for marketing personalization and furthering local brands.

Retailers that have built their business on brand manufacturer marketing funds have built on quicksand. Big CPG brands are under increasing pressure as sales plateau or even decline as a growing number of shoppers avoid packaged foods and massive marketing budgets are directed to the best return on investment—increasingly, that means digital marketing and shopper marketing initiatives that encompass shopper insights and targeting.

In today’s digital world, every interaction with the shopper must be made relevant to the individual customer. That means a dedicated focus on what the shopper wants, not necessarily what the brand manufacturer wants. This shift from the ephemeral riches of brand marketing funds to a sole focus on the individual customer is albeit challenging, but necessary for traditional supermarket operators if they are to survive, let alone thrive, in the new world of retail.

https://www.winsightgrocerybusiness.com/technology/many-retailers-are-asking-wrong-question-about-personalized-offers

Health and Wellness Gets Personal

As a nation, we spend over $5 trillion a year to feed our bodies. That’s the value of food sold each year in the United States through retail and foodservice, including nearly 38,000 supermarkets, an estimated 150,000 convenience stores and over 1 million restaurants. The U.S. food industry is immense, touching every person in the nation every day.

We then spend trillions more each year taking care of ourselves. The U.S. healthcare industry is massive, projected to be over $5 trillion a year by 2025 and representing an estimated 20% of the country’s GDP.

So we have two titanic industries that touch each consumer—and yet, food and healthcare are largely disconnected. Imagine the person who goes to the doctor and receives a diagnosis of Type 2 diabetes, is given a prescription for Metformin, and is told to exercise and watch their diet. Returning home, the same person finds a mailer from their local supermarket with special prices on soft drinks, ice cream and potato chips. This concerning scenario and similar others play out every day for millions of Americans.

The result of this institutional schizophrenia: exploding healthcare costs and poor health conditions for millions of people. The Milliman Research Report states that annual medical costs for a family of four are an estimated $27,000 in 2017. The average life expectancy in the U.S. has dropped two years in a row, the first downturn in over two decades. The bottom line is that healthcare costs are no longer sustainable at the individual, business or government level. Something must give.

Technology is enabling a new paradigm in which healthcare and food are merged together to improve the human condition: personalized wellness. Personalized wellness bridges the chasm by leveraging nutrition science, big data, artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning and consumer technology to guide each person to foods and products beneficial to their individual health condition, and aligns food manufacturers, retailers, employers and managed care organizations to a singular focus—improving and maintaining the well being of the individual.

Personalized Healthcare Meets Mass Marketing

Personalization is a driving force in healthcare today, as genetics, genomics and biomarkers are used to tailor medications to the individual and guide healthcare decisions for the individual. Discovering the right treatment regimen for the individual leads to improved outcomes.

Healthcare personalization is already extending to food. The Isala Hospital in the Netherlands is testing 3D printing of food, customizing each patient’s meals to the unique nutritional requirements based upon specific health conditions and medications. In Germany, a group of retirement homes has adopted 3D printing technology that purees vegetables like carrots and broccoli into nutritional, easy-to-chew soft molds of their original shape. WASP, a 3D printing company based in Italy, is testing a printer that can produce gluten-free versions of popular foods.

And yet as healthcare becomes increasingly personalized to the individual, food marketing remains firmly ensconced in the world of mass marketing. One need look no further than the weekly ad flyers that continue to overwhelm mailboxes across the country. The handful of retailers that tout marketing personalization are focused simply on growing the shopper’s basket size; if you like potato chips the retailer is more than happy to sell you a larger bag next time you visit the store—and maybe a soda too.

Retailers are not oblivious to growing consumer interest in health and wellness. Some retailers have dietitians in the stores to assist shoppers with meal planning and label reading. Other retailers have programs to provide guidance at the shelf, signing products as "heart healthy," "diabetic-friendly" and so on. In addition to retailer efforts there are myriad apps available to help consumers with meal planning based upon user goals such as weight loss or managing diabetes.

But despite the food industry’s efforts, 60% of the nation’s population has at least one chronic illness, with 42% of people having more than one chronic condition. Traditional supermarket operators remain fixated on doing business much as they have for decades, putting products at the center of their business rather than customers, and relying on industry marketing funds tied to the sale of packaged processed foods for their profits. And as healthcare and food merge at the individual consumer, traditional retailers are at risk of being left behind.

https://www.winsightgrocerybusiness.com/wellness/health-wellness-gets-personal

Poor Personalization Will Cost You

Amazon’s business serves one master: the customer. Everything the company does is focused on securing a growing portion of each customer’s spending across a fast-growing array of product categories. That laser focus has powered Amazon to owning an estimated 44% of U.S. e-commerce sales in 2017.

By contrast, traditional supermarket operators say they are customer-focused while, in truth, the same retailers spend vast effort and resources on procurement and securing marketing funds from brand manufacturers. At best, supermarket retailers serve two masters: the customer and the brands. And that two-faced approach will not win the day.

In the digital world, every interaction is all about the individual shopper; there is no room for irrelevant ads or messaging even if the retailer is being paid for it. According to Accenture’s Global Consumer Pulse Research, 44% of U.S. consumers are frustrated when companies fail to deliver relevant, personalized shopping experiences. Poor personalization cost U.S. companies $756 billion last year as 41% of consumers switched companies.

Retailers need to control the entire digital experience provided to their customers. Everything a shopper sees on the retailer’s digital properties must reinforce the company’s branding and positioning and provide the comprehensive, cohesive, seamless and contextually relevant experience shoppers want. Amazon is giving it to them. Kroger is giving it to them. If you don’t, your shoppers will be happy to shop with a competitor who will.

Need for Complete Digital Marketing Ecosystem

Too often, retailers seek to cobble together a digital infrastructure from disparate pieces, trying to graft digital offers onto legacy merchandising and promotion planning solutions and mobile experiences provided by responsive websites rather than sophisticated apps. Website providers and e-commerce solutions have long positioned themselves as digital marketing platforms, but they fall short as a fast-growing number of shoppers want to digitally engage but not necessarily shop online, and as new capabilities extend digital experiences into the physical store.

Instead, retailers need to focus on putting in place a comprehensive digital marketing ecosystem. Such an environment should ideally encompass the entire marketing process from the creation and management of offers and promotions by vendors, a central AI-powered "brain" powering strategic campaigns and personalization across all channels, and deep integration into customer touchpoints providing real-time and seamless interaction.

Ideally, the platform can be opened to vendors—everyone from the big CPG manufacturers to regional brands to the local honey producer—to create digital content and promotions. Tied to a workflow approval process, retailers can bring into their digital ecosystem a vast array of promotions and content to be strategically directed to the right shopper.

It is only through this kind of ecosystem that retailers can provide the coordinated and cohesive user experience shoppers are getting from Amazon. Each product recommendation and promotion presented needs to be contextually relevant to the individual customer while aligned with the retailer’s strategy for growing customer engagement and share of wallet.

Conclusion

The grocery industry is quickly moving online: A recent FMI-Nielsen study projects 20% of industry sales will be done online by 2025, with some category sales hitting 40% of sales online. Amazon’s entry into grocery retail through its acquisition of Whole Foods is doing nothing but accelerating this trend and bringing increased focus to the importance of digital marketing.

Leading retailers, though, realize there is an even bigger game afoot: the fusing together of the digital and physical shopping experiences that goes far beyond simply online shopping. Customers are demanding a seamless and cohesive experience across all devices and touchpoints, and retailers are positioned to deliver new services and values to customers extending into the brick-and-mortar store.

Personalization and relevancy provide the foundation for world-class digital customer engagement, and new cloud-based services are leveraging big data, artificial intelligence and machine learning to provide comprehensive digital marketing platforms. These new platforms help regional retailers transform their marketing and open the door to the countless local and regional brands and vendors retailers work with, lessening dependence on the traditional big CPG brands while supporting shopper’s growing interest in local.

Strategic personalization increasingly underpins the efforts of successful retailers as they move beyond the practices of Kroger and Safeway in providing savings on each customer’s frequently purchased products. And as retailers grow digital customer engagement, it creates the opportunity to expand into personalized pricing, something coming fast to supermarket retail.

Retailers providing the seamless digital experience that customers crave are in turn rewarded with increased customer spending, shopping frequency and growing retention.

Kroger is focused on creating this seamless shopping experience, as Rodney McMullen, Kroger CEO, related in a recent earnings call. “Households that engage in our seamless offerings—engaging digitally and with our physical stores—spend more per week than households that do not,” he said. “The future looks even more promising. We’ll continue to add even more services, expand our available product selection, and more effectively use our insights to create a personalized experience that every customer will love.”

Digital customer engagement is the front line of today’s retail battle and retailers must avail themselves of new platforms to take the lead as technology-fueled innovation powers industry transformation.

https://www.winsightgrocerybusiness.com/technology/poor-personalization-will-cost-you

Why Customer Experience Is the Defining Digital Battleground

There is no better example of how a traditional supermarket retailer must change to remain competitive in today’s world than that provided by Kroger. As the grocery industry moves online and confronted by new competition, Kroger is becoming as much a technology company as it is a grocery retailer. “Companies are iterating not in years but in days,” Matthew Groom, Kroger technology’s general manager said. “We’re in a digital arms race. We’re a 133-year-old grocery chain that’s competing with companies that didn’t exist a year ago.” 

And while technology innovation and consumer adoption of new technology have gotten faster, retailer adoption of new capabilities has remained flat. We have actually seen some retailers that have slowed adoption of new innovation, overwhelmed by the breadth and pace of change.

In this fast moving environment, where digital customer engagement is the battlefield, there are several key areas of innovation that retailers should be watching closely:

Conversational commerce: Voice is quickly becoming the way we interface with technology, the keyboard going the way of landline telephones. Retailers need to appreciate where voice-enabled commerce is headed: the ability of a consumer to literally shop anywhere and at any time simply by speaking.

Amazon is aggressively growing it’s Alexa platform, embedding the voice-enabled digital assistant in a growing array of in-home devices and extending the platform into automobiles via partnerships with Ford, BMW, Hyundai, Volkswagen, and even Garmin navigation devices. Amazon is launching Alexa for Business, intent on bringing the virtual assistant into the workplace; Alexa is already integrated to some Microsoft Office applications. The magnitude of the threat takes on greater urgency when you consider that Amazon is forecast to have 70% of the voice-enabled speaker market this year and that by 2020 it is projected there will be 128 million Alexa devices installed.

In response, Google is working hard to expand Assistant, its voice-controlled digital assistant, making it available through speakers, smartphones, headsets, and even cars. Google is assembling a consortium of retail partners, including Walmart, PetSmart, Walgreens, Costco, and others, to counter Amazon’s voice-enabled shopping platform.

Self-shopping: Kroger is rolling out a wireless scanning device it calls Scan, Bag, Go at 400 stores next year. Customers will use the device to ring up groceries as they shop, then pay for their purchases through an app. Walmart has been rolling out its Scan & Go app providing similar capabilities across hundreds of stores.

Other companies are bringing video-based solutions to bear, providing technology like that used in the cashier-less Amazon Go store. AI powered image recognition is able to track what specific products a shopper picks up and puts in her basket, charging the shopper’s account automatically on her way out the door.

Assisted/automated replenishment: Amazon is leading the way with its Dash buttons, enabling one-click reordering of products, and integrating its Dash Replenishment Service into a growing number of smart home appliances.

Personalized pricing: Airlines do it. Hotels do it. Retailers do it. Personalized pricing is already here as Kroger and Safeway continue to grow their personalized marketing programs. Retailers should be looking ahead as personalized pricing becomes mainstream, driven by knowledge of customer economics and powered by AI and machine learning systems that automate the process.

While many retailers don’t yet realize it, retail competition has moved from mass promotion to a stealth battle for the individual customer’s share-of-wallet driven by precision targeted promotions. Personalized pricing is the next step.

Personalized wellness: Food and health are rapidly converging as health conditions are linked to beneficial products driven by sophisticated nutrition data science. Programs are coming to market that provide intelligent guidance to the individual shopper, helping them navigate the store to find products beneficial to their specific health conditions or lifestyles.

While retailers must move posthaste to digitally engage customers, they must do so with thoughtful planning and a clear digital capability road map.  Too often, we are seeing significant retailers charging ahead to deploy new capabilities only to be confronted by disparate solutions requiring expensive and time consuming integration and making it increasingly difficult to provide the seamless user experience that shoppers are demanding.

https://www.winsightgrocerybusiness.com/technology/why-customer-experience-defining-digital-battleground

How Personalization is Reshaping the Shopping Experience

Amazon, the nemesis of brick & mortar retailers, is a master at helping shoppers discover relevant products the shopper may be interested in. Amazon leverages a vast amount of knowledge it collects on each shopper to select a few key products to suggest to shoppers drawn from the estimated 600 million products sold. This shopper intelligence includes past purchases, what the shopper has searched for in the past, and even the shopper’s browsing and clicking history. This ability to personalize each interaction with each individual shopper is powerful. In fact, 56% of consumers say Amazon demonstrates an understanding of their individual preferences and needs on a regular basis, according to research by Swirl Networks.

Now, imagine that capability turned loose on Whole Foods shoppers. And consider the impact of Amazon presenting relevant Whole Foods products to the tens of millions of shoppers across its platform each day as it takes Whole Foods private label products online.

Many supermarket executives do not yet fully appreciate the power of discovery as executed so well by Amazon and yet brick & mortar retailers have a massive opportunity to help shoppers discover products of interest across the store. What’s more, a growing number of shoppers—especially millennials—are interested in the story behind the product, wanting to know where it’s from, sustainability information, and the values espoused by the manufacturer. All this is tailor-made for making product discovery exciting and engaging.

For more than the past decade, Kroger has taken a more direct approach to marketing personalization, providing savings on specific products that each customer household frequently purchases. This strategy has helped Kroger win a growing number of shopping trips and bigger baskets as customers consolidate their shopping. Marketing personalization is a centerpiece of Kroger’s Customer First strategy and has been key to the company’s performance in recent years.

Kroger’s success has led other Tier 1 retailers like Albertsons-Safeway and Ahold to adopt a similar customer-centric strategy. While Tier 1 retailers may be able to afford the consulting agency model, with its accompanying army of data analysts, as espoused by dunnhumby, Symphony EYC, and others, regional retailers have found it to be an expensive proposition. But technology is disrupting and transforming all areas of business today and marketing is no exception. Artificial intelligence and machine learning feeding off big data and providing services through the cloud not only lower the cost to deploy sophisticated personalization, but provide the next generation tools that retailers need.

The use of customer segments to underpin personalized marketing is yesterday’s approach. Today’s solutions leverage hundreds of attributes, calculated and maintained at the individual shopper level, to power true segment-of-one strategic personalization. AI and machine learning power providing the right promotions—presented at the right time and place across every channel—to win the shopping trip, grow baskets, increase shopping trips, and maximize retention. This is the new approach traditional retailers need to compete against the likes of Amazon and Kroger.

Personalization is extending far beyond offers and into the shopping experience itself as retailers provide valuable new services to their shoppers.

Coborn’s is in the vanguard of retailers employing new sophisticated technologies to meld the digital and physical shopping experience. Shoppers at Coborn’s are greeted as they enter the store, triggered by a beacon interacting with the Coborn’s app. Knowing the store the shopper just walked into, the app automatically sorts the customer’s shopping list by aisle for that store. The shopper is provided relevant offers as they move around the store triggered by real-time location. Coupons are presented in order of relevancy making it easy for the shopper to find savings on products they like to buy. And Coborn’s shoppers can make use of a product locator function in the app, easily finding products in the store via a Google map like capability.

Personalization is not stopping at offers or even the in-store experience. Leading retailers are focused on implementing personalized pricing to drive even more gains. Imagine being able to provide the right product at the right price to each individual shopper to win the trip or grow the basket. Big data and artificial intelligence make promotion and pricing optimization at the individual customer level practical. And in a world demanding evermore ROI from marketing expenditures, personalized pricing is inevitable. The stealth battle for customer share-of-wallet is just getting started.

https://www.winsightgrocerybusiness.com/technology/how-personalization-reshaping-shopping-experience

Let’s Get Personal: Digital Customer Engagement in Supermarket Retail

As physical brick-and-mortar shopping melds with the digital world, customer experience is the defining battleground since shoppers can now engage with retailers at any time and from any place using different devices. This is about far more than just online shopping. New capabilities have come into the market that are transforming the shopping experience itself, especially in the store, where a majority of retail sales continue to take place. Retailers can avail themselves of leading edge cloud-based solutions, purpose-built to fuse together the digital and physical shopping experience, bringing new services and values to shoppers.

According to the Wall Street Journal, Amazon’s recent acquisition of Whole Foods "highlights the convergence of digital and physical shopping and represents a significant shift in the competitive landscape. For Amazon, which already has access to a wealth of customer data, the acquisition gives the e-commerce player an understanding of what consumers want from their in-store experiences as well as a brick-and-mortar foothold."

Digitally engaged shoppers are already impacting a significant portion of sales. In 2016, 51% of in-store grocery sales were influenced by digital technologies somewhere along the path to purchase, up from 33% in 2015, according to Deloitte Consulting’s study, The Grocery Digital Divide. During a recent earnings call, Kroger reported that it saw a 30% growth in new digital customers in Q1 2017 and a 30% growth in digital visits.

Successful digital engagement is built on a foundation of relevancy and personalization and requires a tight, seamless and real-time integration with the retailer’s app, website, email, e-commerce, text messaging and even social media channels to provide the user experience customers expect. According to the Deloitte study, 80% of surveyed shoppers have used a digital device to research grocery products, and 77% have used digital channels such as cooking blogs, recipe websites and social media to learn about products during the awareness stage.

While traditional brick-and-mortar retailers are moving online, they are falling further behind. As Amazon and Google push to be everywhere, supermarket retailers struggle to even have a cohesive mobile presence, an imperative today with 34% of respondents saying they use a smartphone to help them choose a brand during a shopping trip, according to the Deloitte study. As reported on eMarketer.com, in 2016, more people accessed the internet through mobile devices than traditional desktop and notebook computers, and 86% of the time online via mobile devices was spent within apps, not mobile browsers.

Yet traditional retailers are slow to understand the importance of mobile and especially the mobile user experience. Case in point: Safeway shoppers must use three different apps (basic grocery app, pharmacy app and online shopping app) to interact with the retailer, which is not exactly a friendly, cohesive user experience.

Adding fuel to the fire, CPG brand manufacturers are aggressively redirecting massive marketing budgets to shopper marketing initiatives and digital marketing, forcing retailers to focus on growing digital customer engagement. CPG digital marketing budgets have grown an estimated 280% from five years ago while shopper marketing budgets have more than doubled, according to recent research from Cadent Consulting Group.

While maintaining access to industry marketing funds is the stick, increased shopper spending is the carrot. Effective marketing personalization delivers increases in customer spending of 5% or more. Forrester found that companies who fully invest in modern personalization will outsell their competitors by 20%. These gains are understandable when 88% of consumers say they’re more likely to shop with retailers that deliver personalized and connected cross-channel experiences.

But many retail executives find themselves in foreign territory as retail success demands a shift from the product-driven past to a customer-focused future. While comfortable with supply chain logistics, in-store merchandising and labor efficiency, appreciating the nuances of mobile app user experience, omnipresence via voice-enabled commerce and automating replenishment of household goods through IoT technology leaves many retailers flummoxed.

Given all this competitive activity, industry executives need to get up to speed fast. The $650 billion supermarket industry is rupturing in real-time as grocery buying moves online and technology driven innovation explodes across the supply chain. Another recent Wall Street Journal article calls out that there were 25,380 grocery stores with at least $2 million in annual sales in 2016, and the number of stores is expected to drop to an estimated 19,000 by 2021; that’s a decline of nearly 25% in the next four years.

In this stark future, retailers’ ability to meld the physical and digital worlds and drive compelling digital engagement with shoppers is a must-have capability.

​https://www.winsightgrocerybusiness.com/technology/lets-get-personal-digital-customer-engagement-supermarket-retail