By Shop! ANZ General Manager Carla Bridge.
Eighteen months into a global pandemic and Australian grocery retail has emerged fairly unscathed. What has changed in order for retailers to adapt and succeed?
In-store and point of purchase (POP) marketing is a vital motivator for shoppers, and one of the few influencers that can genuinely encourage purchases at the point of sale or directly preceding a sale.
As the only not for profit industry association for retail marketing in Australia and New Zealand, Shop! ANZ has studied the market and identified the top five trends retail marketers are using in grocery this year to ensure continued sales.
What’s the occasion?
There haven’t been too many occasions we’ve been able to get out and truly celebrate over the past 18 months, so grocery marketers placed greater effort on those that exist in an effort to bring a bit of extra celebration and joy to our lives. Occasion-based campaigns have always been popular, but in late 2020 and early 2021 we saw exponential growth in a couple of occasions, primarily Halloween. With Halloween falling at the end of a prolonged period of lock down in Melbourne, one of our biggest cities, and shoppers elsewhere still cautious, Halloween was the perfect opportunity for confectionery brands to push a previously little celebrated occasion and drive sales of share bags. And that it did. XPO Brand’s Cadbury ‘Build a Haunted House’ campaign for Mondelēz saw the brand create life-sized cardboard chocolate haunted house POS in stores, featuring spiderwebs and integrating product characters such as Freddo Frog as Dracula and Sour Patch kids as a witch. The campaign saw Mondelēz deliver the most growth of all confectionery manufacturers for the season, with share bags up driven by wrapped confectionery (more suited for Halloween during Covid times).
Read the ‘Five top POP trends of 2021’ article in full in the July-August issue of Convenience World.
