Merchandising and Marketing
SUPERVALU delivers a comprehensive array of store-level support services that help grocery retailers maximize sales through highly innovative merchandising and marketing strategies.
Expertise in category management is no longer a "nice-to-have" in the grocery industry. It's now a necessity. SUPERVALU's category management services help our grocer customers address fierce competition and fickle consumers by enhancing existing merchandising practices with superior consumer insight.
SUPERVALU provides grocers with the consumer, category and competitive information they need to become or remain market leaders. The result? Retail merchandising that enhances consumer value, drives store gains and expands business opportunities.
Chasing - and Catching - Today's Consumer
Today's consumers are sophisticated and highly fragmented. Product suppliers and retailers alike are chasing consumers with mind-boggling arrays of new products and categories and new store formats. SUPERVALU's category management program helps grocers determine the "whys" behind purchasing behavior, enhancing their ability to retain core shoppers and capture new ones. Today, more than 1,200 retailers participate in the SUPERVALU category management program.
SUPERVALU's category management program is a three-way partnership between SUPERVALU, its suppliers and retailers to manage product categories as strategic business units, turn consumers into satisfied customers and more effectively drive retail sales.
SUPERVALU Category Management - Recognized Industry Leadership
SUPERVALU's comprehensive program is helping retailers meet their category management goals. In fact, retailers are realizing results that equal or exceed industry averages for dollar-sales increases, unit-sales increases and reductions in SKU counts. Through the category management process, SUPERVALU helps retailers:
- Construct a consumer-friendly item mix, resulting in better management of retail inventory assets and improved speed-to-shelf for new items to garner those important first-time sales.
- Create shelf layouts that increase consumer purchases while reducing retail out-of-stocks.
- Produce effective retail promotions that efficiently allocate promotion funds to drive sales and enhance profitability.
- Strategically price items to heighten consumer-perceived value while maintaining gross profit at retail.
- Create specific store strategies to address alternative-format competition and store layout recommendations to capture today's busy consumers.
Pricing Services
SUPERVALU's tactical and strategic pricing services are widely used by retailers across the country to give retailers a competitive pricing edge. SUPERVALU integrates store data, base zone pricing, competitive pricing and pricing best practices to impact sales and gross margin for the retailer. The result is better competitive positioning of the retailer versus the competition.
Center-Store Strategy
Grocery retailers today are increasingly losing market share to mass merchandisers, particularly in key center-store product categories such as paper products and laundry detergents. As an extension of our category management capabilities, SUPERVALU helps retailers develop tested, effective merchandising strategies to counteract this trend and reclaim sales in center-store categories.
By applying the principles of category management to key product categories, SUPERVALU works with grocery retailers to assess which categories are most vulnerable to attack by mass merchants. Then we develop customized pricing and merchandising strategies to recapture lost categories and defend those that are potentially vulnerable.
According to industry research, a well-executed center store strategy can improve the average market basket by as much as $1.50. Today, more than 500 independent grocers, as well as SUPERVALU's own corporate retail stores, rely on our center-store strategy.
Advertising and Creative Services
SUPERVALU supports grocery retailers with a comprehensive set of creative, advertising and promotional services that help build customer awareness, traffic, loyalty and store sales. The goal of SUPERVALU's advertising and sales promotion group is to be the most effective marketing communications resource - and the most cost efficient - for our affiliated retailers, regardless of store size or format. We focus on developing sound marketing plans around defined goals to achieve measurable results.
SUPERVALU's range of capabilities run the gamut from marketing and advertising plan development, to grand opening and event marketing solutions, to Web site development. Services include:
- Retail strategy products
- New store format strategy
- New market strategy
- Media planning
- Creative strategy development
- Marketing planning
- Advertising production
- Point-of-sale material development
- Marketing communications training
- In-store marketing communications
- Communications and media relations support
- Web site development and management
More Information?
For more information about SUPERVALU's merchandising and marketing services, use our inquiry form.