For the past month we have been revamping our Compete product. The aim of the product is to provide retailer category managers and CPG brand managers a view of the competitive landscape from the perspective of the shopper.

This week is one of the important weeks in grocery retail. For food retailers, Easter usually means family gatherings which means there are more mouths to feed. Consequently, this means bigger baskets, so it is important to win in these weeks.

We stayed in Towson MD for this week's analysis and have included the same set of banners from last week, with the exception of Eddies, who had not published their weekly circular at the time of analysis.

Before we get into the analysis of who won the week it's worth looking at the strategies that different retailers employ for promotional planning. One of the big decisions is what day is the start of your promotional week. A lot of retailers opt for Wednesday, it means hanging price tags on Tuesday evening which is usually a quiet day in retail. What's interesting in this group of banners is that the majority of them start their promotional week on a Friday.

This data adds support that Giant Food and Safeway are locked in a promotional fight each week. Interestingly, my local Safeway (on the West coast) runs a Wednesday-Tuesday promotional week, so someone in Safeway's HQ has decided to split the promo planning process in two. Weis Markets, a smaller operator, are trying to get the jump on the price conscious shopper/ cherry picker by running Thursday-Wednesday promotional week, a solid flanking move if you don't have the promo budgets of your competitors.

Every week, in the headquarters of grocery supermarkets across the country, the chief merchants and category managers will get together to see who "won the week". How the winner is determined is only part data-driven, relying on a combination of factors; depth of discount vs quality of item. What's missing from this calculation is customer behavior.

In this regular series of blog posts we are going to rectify that by putting our grocery AI model to the test and establish, through data, who won the week based on customer response to the combined set of offers from all[^*] retailers' promotions that week.

How do you grow a business? If you asked that question in an MBA college class, you’d get a varied set of answers, but themes would emerge: have a strategy, control costs, know your customer, a unique product/service, execute the plan. None of these answers are wrong, but MBA students’ answers miss the point: the real world is imperfect with neither the time, resources nor budgets to tackle the issue of growth from an academic standpoint. Shareholders want value…now. Customers want the product/service…now. Employees want to be taken care of…now. In established businesses, a growth strategy generally involves changing an existing course of action. What exists may be well known and preferred, and change is generally seen as something which is painful, risky and undesirable.

Which explains why many businesses eke out incremental growth year after year. So, let’s address some of the macro questions associated with growth and strategy.

According to the Harvard Business Review, they are. 

So, is it true? And if so, what should we (the AI industry) and we (marketers) do about it? Luckily, HBR lives up to its reputation, offering practical advice as well as insight. And living up to our reputation for being helpful, DecaSIM decided to summarize the HBR article for you (below).

(And, yes, we used ChatGPT to create the summary. In case you’re wondering, it took about 25 seconds to write the prompt, copy the URL and copy/paste the summary into Word. It’s taken longer to write this intro.)

First of all, if you’re in the financial, distribution, restaurant/hospitality, transportation, consulting, energy or consumer industries there’s a higher-than-average chance your CEO is new. So that covers nearly all of us. In fact, those industries are responsible for 73% of all CEO turnover in the Fortune 500 and S&P 500 companies (674 in total) through August 2023.

In case you missed it, USPS has published its proposed rate increases starting January 21st 2024. It’s doubtful many people are bothered by this personally, no one uses snail mail anymore, only junk mail, utility bills and weekly ads arrive in our mailboxes.

But if you’re still sending thousands of letters or ad fliers you most certainly are bothered by it. The drive to go ‘paperless’ is reaching fever pitch with everyone from credit cards and loyalty programs screaming at us to ‘save the planet’, a.k.a. save me the price of the stamp and keep my business costs down. Like the hotels telling us to ‘save the planet’, a.k.a. save me the price of washing towels and keep my business costs down.

Indeed, this is the DecaSIM blog.

Our purpose is to describe how we are going to revolutionize the world of merchandising planning using AI tools.

If we had a time machine, we would have written this 6 years ago.