Who Won The Week Pt. 2
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.
| Banner | Promotion Week Start Day | Included | Page Count |
|---|---|---|---|
| The Fresh Market | Wednesday | Yes | 2 |
| Sprouts Farmers Market | Wednesday | Yes | 7 |
| Weis Markets | Thursday | Yes | 5 |
| Eddies | Friday | No | - |
| Giant Food | Friday | Yes | 9 |
| Grauls | Friday | Yes | 2 |
| Safeway | Friday | Yes | 5 |
Weekly Ads
For clarity, here is the front page for Weis, Giant and Safeway. From a page count, Giant Food are running a 9 page ad. No doubt, their physical print version, the one delivered to shoppers' mailboxes, will have an even number of pages but since we are just analyzing the front page of their digital versions, these retailers can choose what ever page count that works. Both Weis and Safeway run 5 pages, again with the same digital vs print pagination caveat.
Who Won?
As with last week's analysis, we ran these promotions through our AI model of shopper behavior to find out which promos get selected from each banner's front page. Of the 400+ items on promo around 80 were selected by our model. The distribution of these by banner shows that Giant Food had a very strong showing this week.
With 44% of promos selected, Giant Food promos were selected nearly twice as often as Safeway, their big rival in Towson. Despite running a much smaller weekly ad, The Fresh Market ham promotions helped it place higher than its more promotionally-driven competitors.
Summary
Easter is a big week for retailers, shoppers open their wallets during these holiday weeks, and having a strong set of promos is critical. Giant Food was the clear winner for Easter week. Weis Markets are worth a mention, their strategy of running a day earlier than Safeway and Giant Food lets them run a weaker set of promotions (as evidenced by their low % score) but they will be capturing a greater share of the Thursday trade without having to offer the level of discounts on offer at Giant and Safeway.