The changing values of UK supermarket shoppers

Dr Steve Smith, head of thought leadership at Starcom MediaVest Group, reveals key insights from research in to supermarket shoppers this Christmas – a study that is particularly pertinent in view of Mary Portas’ independent report into the demise of the High Street…

In a tough trading environment the ‘Big 5’ supermarkets are fighting over price and quality

In early October 2011, Britain’s biggest retailer, Tesco, announced one of its worst sales performances in its UK stores for twenty years. In contrast, Sainsbury’s and Morrisons reported that like for like sales for the quarter were up.

In response, Tesco announced that it was to launch its £500 million ‘Big Price Drop’ campaign in the run up to Christmas. Similarly, Sainsbury’s launched its Live Well for Less campaign, again focusing on price. Even upmarket supermarket Waitrose announced that it would seek to improve on price.

All of this is taking place against a backdrop of an uncertain economic future, and what Mary Portas describes as a crisis in many of the UK’s town centres and their communities, in her independent review into the future of the UK high streets, just published.

Community and pleasure and community are increasingly important to UK shoppers

Obviously, shoppers want competitive prices and quality in an economic downturn. Yet Starcom MediaVest Group research, using its proprietary research application ‘SpaceID’ shows that community and pleasure are especially important to most chief supermarket shoppers.

The importance of pleasure and especially community is good news for supermarkets. With all supermarkets focused on price, they need something else to differentiate them and demonstrate their commitment to shoppers’ lives, and local communities, charities and projects. But we need to be clear what we mean by ‘community’. Ask people what community means to them, they will talk about their local neighbourhood communities, but they will also talk about how important their networks of friends and family are to them. Ask them about pleasure, and they talk about self-gratification, enjoyment of life and fun.

SpaceID shows how supermarkets can protect their customer base and poach customers from competitors

Uncovering people’s real emotional values enables marketers to more carefully and precisely target them and understand their media affinities. Yet while most research tries to uncover underlying values by asking direct attitudinal questions of people, it is very difficult for people to understand let alone articulate them.

SpaceID moves beyond this direct approach by measuring people’s responses to 210 key words, and then separately asking them about their media and brand behaviours. Running since 2008, we have been able to uncover changes in people’s values across a representative sample of 2,500 people and map these values across four key axes.

Supermarket UK findings

Over the last three years we have seen a gradual shift in the values of chief supermarket shoppers, toward community and pleasure. When we look at the value profiles of each supermarket’s chief shoppers, we can see that ASDA and Sainsbury’s attract the most community minded shoppers, while the Co-Operative attracts the most pleasure seeking shoppers. People who regularly shop at Morrisons are very different, with their values tending to be around autonomy and responsibility.

After looking more precisely at how the values of regular shoppers are constituted, we are best able to see where opportunities for poaching customers from other supermarkets lie for each supermarket, as well as threats. The research shows that Sainsbury’s and ASDA will need to compete strongly in 2012 and that Waitrose is especially vulnerable to competitive poaching.

Bringing price, pleasure and community together

Waitrose is well positioned to strengthen its pleasure and community positioning, already having a reputation for providing a pleasurable shopping experience and for its commitment to local communities and charities by way of in-store giving and its employee partnership programme. The Co-Operative has a similar reputation around community giving, investing £12.4 million into local community partnerships in 2010.

To really embrace the importance of pleasure and community to shoppers, supermarkets need to deliver at all facets of the shopping experience and beyond, from ads and online shopping, to the shopping environment, customer service, social media and the knowledge people are getting good quality food that together will enhance people’s networks of friends and family. At the same time, they need to grow at supporting local community initiatives, such as local charities, local businesses and independent retailers, and so support community wellbeing, as Portas recommends.

Christmas is a time of the year that especially exemplifies the importance to people of community and pleasure. In 2012, supermarkets that are able to differentiate themselves on their abilities to communicate and deliver these to their shoppers and local areas will gain an extra advantage – and a greater share of the changing consumer’s wallet. Associating with media spaces that share similar values, designing experiences online, in-store and through ads that provide pleasure and enhance people’s networks of friends and family, and committing themselves to local neighbourhood communities will be the keys to supermarkets creating successful media strategies in 2012.