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.
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.
Book mark this blog if you want to become an expert in Merchandising AI
If we had a time machine, we would have written this 6 years ago.