What Happens in Vegas…Ends Up in a Blog Entry
When you tell someone you’re about to spend four days in Vegas, you usually get one of two reactions: a pained look of sympathy that reads ‘I’ll pray for you,’ or a punchline about not forgetting Advil and sunglasses. But when you tell someone you’re about to spend four days in Vegas at a grocery conference, the reaction is pretty one-note:
“Oh! That’s…interesting (?)”
Despite the confusion, they’re exactly right — it is interesting!
Groceryshop, a three-day innovation conference held last week in Las Vegas, is dedicated to addressing shared challenges, opportunities, and disruptions in the rapidly changing grocery industry — the first of its kind to do so. The event boasted 2,000+ attendees, including representatives from established and startup CPG brands, supermarkets, c-stores, drug stores, discount stores, ecommerce players, warehouse clubs…and us.
The conference itself was flawlessly executed. Channeling Bill Hader’s infamous SNL character Stefon, Divya appropriately coined Groceryshop “Vegas’ hottest club,” and she wasn’t wrong. It had everything — branded stress balls shaped like eggplants, a puppy petting zoo, aerial yogis handing out free champagne, high energy percussionists demanding an unenthusiastic call and response, unlimited (!) peach ring gummies, and an entire seminar on the future of energy efficiency in refrigeration.
That alone would have made for an interesting four days, but beyond the glitz and glam of the event, the insights, observations, and predictions of the current and future states of the grocery and CPG industry were invaluable, as was the immersion into the world of food tech.
The TL;DR version? Grocery as we know it is undergoing a massive shift right now across the entire vertical, and while a lot of wise old legacies are doing their best to keep on keeping on, just as many (if not more) smart n00bs are getting into the game to get a piece of the pie.
Have a minute? Check out some of our takeaways below to get a good idea of the ecosystem Gravy is breaking into.
Playing to Win in the Digital Age
Digital, digital, digital. The internet may feel like it’s been around for, like, ever, but grocery has been dragging its feet to figure out how to conquest the “new” frontier. As a result, e-commerce is just disrupting traditional models and transforming relationships between consumers, brands, and distributors. The keys to the e-kingdom are definitely still out for the taking (though Amazon got a great head start with their Whole Foods acquisition), but there are a few traits of winning players that seem to a part of the success formula — namely, shopper intimacy, omnichannel adept, low-friction platforms, and “crafty” upsells.
To Know Me is to Sell to Me
If you’re wondering what the grocery store of the future is going to be like, look no further than what’s inside yourself. That’s right — the future is personalized. From personal micro-stores to personal assistants, and from on-demand delivery to auto-replenishment, the goal of grocery is to be everywhere you didn’t even know you needed it to be. Anticipation, on top of personalization, is a hot ticket item. It didn’t sound like anyone was working on a drone that would deliver hot chicken noodle soup to you before you even had a sniffle yet (free business idea, you’re welcome), but it also didn’t sound like that was too far off.
Data is the New Oil
Forget mining oil — data is the new king. But unlike oil, too much data won’t lead to an empire. Rather, it will lead to a pretty massive headache, as having too much data and not knowing what to do with it has the same endgame of not having any data at all. It is extremely important to organize and clean data to enhance its value, and not be afraid of eliminating superfluous attributes. But even still, having organized and clean data is sometimes difficult to know what to do with. That’s where AI comes in — and if data is the new oil, AI is the new oil rig. AI makes big data useful by helping to unlocking the value of data sets that are too massive for (most of) our human brains to make much sense of, and is critical when it comes to connecting audiences to brands to drive both online and offline sales and shopper marketing. Just a handful of examples of how data and AI is affecting grocery is how brands are utilizing machine learning with personalization (see above) and scale to carefully and efficiently show the right content to the right people, and how supermarkets are turning to AI for promotional product selection, price optimization, and optimizing promotional cadences. Truly, if you’re not using data, get ready to go the way of the dinosaurs, as there is no scale today for legacy systems.
The Ever-Changing Consumer
Disruptive technology has not been the only catalyst for change within the grocery industry. One of the largest waves has come directly from consumers themselves (so, us). And, it’s not just purchasing behaviors that have gotten a reset, it’s gone much deeper to the core purchase values. Consciously or subconsciously, we tend to look for several things when it comes to what brand to buy. At the top of the checklist, there’s the price and value of a product, something that’s remained steady throughout the evolution of the customer. But moving down the list from there are now contemporary expectations that deeply influence our willingness to buy — namely, time/convenience, experience, and the emotional connection with the brand. There are several factors that may have contributed to this shift, but the largest influences can be boiled down to three main things: discretionary income (more money, more decisions), convenience expectations (expectations of immediate satisfaction), and channel content proliferations (decision fatigue). All in all, in order to harness growth, you must be able to understand not only customer journeys, but the customers themselves.
