For about seven years I worked at a supermarket in my small hometown. To some of you, that seems like the average boring job any teenager gets, but for me it was a time where I’ve learned more about customer service, co-operating and even economy in its smallest and finest form.
Here are three lessons from my supermarket career, that I hope to bring in practice at Mappening:
1. People follow other people
A part of the time I worked at a supermarket, I was a green greengrocer. In this section it is really important to present the (hopefully) fresh products the best way possible. But presentation doesn’t always ensure that people actually buy your product. Yes, a shiny and aromatic watermelon is irresistible for most people, but how do you sell a strange and ‘unsexy’ fruit like a persimmon? In Dutch we have the expression ‘what a farmer doesn’t know, he doesn’t eat’ and so it goes with the persimmon.
I could tell customers that this unfamiliar fruit is really delicious and put it in a place where they can’t ignore it, but it works a lot better when someone else tells them about it. When somebody is putting some persimmons in their basket, people start asking him or her what it tastes like and if they should buy it as well. After my greengrocer carreer, I figured we would have sold a lot more of these fruits if we would have hired a customer to stand all day next to the persimmons.
So the lesson is: you can tell people your product is great, but other people and certainly friends are the ones that can really convince you to buy or use it. So at Mappening we need to find those influencals.
2. Always have an answer
This lesson is consistent with the previous one. When people ask you about your product, it’s important to always have a quick answer. When someone is wondering if the persimmon is tasting good, you have to answer convincingly. The same counts if you receive a lot of questions about wether or not the potatoes are new harvest, knowing that people only buy them if they are. You naturally answer the right thing. Or you tell them the old ones are as good as the new ones.
If you have any visible doubts about the product you sell, people won’t buy it. I found out it’s important to always have an answer ready to questions about your product — or start-up. It doesn’t matter if the answer is always the right one, but it’s of great importance to at least have one. If you’re not convinced about your start-up, nobody else is gonna be.
3. Create a musthave
The most important difference between a supermarket and our start-up is that people will always need groceries, but are actually capable of living without Mappening. I don’t want to suggest that people don’t need our start-up, but we’re not the only existing newsplatform. Of course most of the towns and cities have different supermarkets, but people are not likely to make a change and travel somewhere further.
But still there are similarities: not every product in the supermarket is something you really need.
Supermarkets are full of stuff our ancestors never had, but nowadays everyone is buying. This is the result of smart marketeers. A good example is the Danish Chef cheese spread every supermarket puts next to the Bugles chips. Aren’t chips meant to be tasty by themselves? Why do we need cheese to fill them up?
Selling side products is something supermarkets are great at. And it’s also an important thing we need to do at Mappening. Because due to sites like Facebook, the homepage is dead: readers now mostly get to you via social media.
Herefore it’s of great importance that people are not reading one, but a a lot more stories. At this point we’re thinking about how we can get people to easily swipe from one story to another they might like. Do we need to navigate our visitors to things they never thought they’d be interested in — as you do walking through the supermarket, attracted by discounts and colorful packiging- or is it important to present the best side products to things they already like?
These are only three lessons I learned during my supermarket career, but there is a lot more we can learn from this industry. So start-up people, maybe you need to hire a (former) merchandiser. They sometimes know more about sales than that expensive salesguy.
Jasper Piersma
