Don’t blink or you’ll miss them. Seriously.
PROMO’S four-hour run through one of Stop & Shop’s Norwalk, CT, stores was a lesson in the clean store policies that have made the grocery sell-in such a formidable task: We encountered a limited supply of displays, and shelf materials that, other than some coupon dispensers, were dedicated exclusively to the chain’s frequent-shopper program. Otherwise, there was virtually no other manufacturer signage across the entire 60,000 square feet of floor space.
Thus, the vast majority of the 363 promotional messages we uncovered were on-pack, which meant it took a deliberately discerning eye to identify them except in the cereal aisle, of course, where a promo-less box front was actually more conspicuous.
Displays: A relatively unexceptional total of 23, most of the endcap variety and most store-driven with multiple and even competing (General Mills and Post cereals) brands gaining the real estate. PepsiCo wins the “brand clout” award for a massive display located immediately inside the primary entrance (although Coke was stacked on the backside) touting its Tomb Raider movie tie-in, and two endcaps: one for snack unit Frito-Lay’s Doritos and its Atlantis tie-in, and another for Tropicana (albeit alongside Keebler’s Cheez-It crackers).
The most interesting cardboard concoction sat in front of the pharmacy window: a Welch’s grape juice display with the recommendation, “Ask our pharmacist how this product may help you.”
Games, contests, and sweepstakes: A total of 51, with most either enter-to-win sweeps or instant-win games, and the majority found on kid-skewing products such as cereal, ice cream, snacks, and soda (although the beer aisle was also well represented). Brands ranged from the obvious (Coke, Post) to the not-so (Sunsweet Prune Juice, Larry’s instant potatoes).
The directly competitive offers were few outside the cereal, beer, and soda categories. One of the most blatant examples, however, was found over in the baby aisle: Pampers Premium Custom diapers (featuring Sesame Street characters) hosted a Vantastic sweeps giving away a Chrysler Town & Country mini-van, while nearby Huggies Supreme (and its Winnie the Pooh imagery) had an instant-win game dangling a “Family Adventure Van.”
Licensed products: A total of 93 (mostly kid-targeted) products leveraged an entertainment property, including numerous SKUs in personal hygiene (toothpaste, shampoo, bubble bath, and a slew of Band-Aid products), snacks, juice, and cereals. Nickelodeon, Disney, and Sesame Street accounted for most of the character-based lines. Among five sports-related licenses, three were for NASCAR and one each were for MLB and the NBA.
Do they work? Standing in the diaper section, PROMO overheard a mom asking her two-year-old boy, “Which do you want, sweetie, Bear [in the Big Blue House] or Mickey Mouse?”
Premiums: A total of 33, including 18 on-pack/in-pack offers for stickers, movie tickets, baseball cards, temporary tattoos, and various toys, along with 15 mail-in offers. Most unique were mail-in pitches for a free game of bowling with Mug Root Beer, trial magazine subscriptions with Dannon spring water, and a 10-minute phonecard with Marcal napkins in what was an otherwise promo-free paper products aisle (other than the licensed line of Sneezers tissues).
There were also 17 self-liquidating offers, including a recipe book and magnet from Bertolli Olive Oil, a video tagged to Special K, a Buzz Lightyear bowl on Campbell’s Soup, and a finger-puppet set from Teddy Grahams.
Product Focus
Coupons: There were 51 coupon offers, 40 on- or in-pack and 11 via SmartSource shelf dispensers. There were also five on the checkout receipt, although all of those were for neighborhood merchants.
Among other product-focused offers, there were 15 extra-product offers (á la “Now 33% More”), five buy-one-get-ones, and a lone mail-in rebate.
Loyalty/continuity programs: The nine examples were few and far between although, as mentioned earlier, Stop & Shop’s own scan-saver program was ubiquitous. But they were also interestingly eclectic: heavily supported fare like Frito-Lay’s ePloids and Miller’s Get the Goods, a pair of “online cash” continuity efforts from Dole and Tropicana (along with sister Frito-Lay), and lesser-known campaigns for Tic Tac (Incredible Stuff), Kool Aid (Kool Points), Pop Secret (Poppers Club), Fresh Step (Paw Points), and Cap’n Crunch (Crunch Club).
Cross-branding: There was a surprisingly low total of four, including free samples of Aventis’s Cepacol throat lozenges on bottles of both Cepacol mouthwash and Biersdorf’s Eucerin lotion. But our favorite was the free trial size pack of Bayer’s Midol pain reliever on boxes of Procter & Gamble’s Tampax.
Network
