Monday, March 8, 2010

Enhance Convenience via Teammates

Some Winn-Dixie supermarkets now sell bus passes and debit cards. Plans are to let customers pay their utility bills while shopping.
     If you follow the trend to offer added services like Winn-Dixie is doing, you can enhance convenience for customers. But here are tips from a consumer psychology perspective for succeeding in this type of strategic partnering:
  • Choose categories of products and services that your shoppers are likely to expect to see and for which it works best to have another business be the provider. Researchers at George Mason University and Ohio Northern University pointed out how shoppers have clear rituals. So when they go to a grocery store, they’ve come to expect to see movie rentals and, increasingly, to get gasoline. Winn-Dixie delegated the movie rentals to Redbox kiosks and handled the gas sales by giving loyalty card holders a discount on purchases at Shell stations.
  • With the product/service categories, team up with brands that are compatible with your target markets and store personality. The Florida Times-Union reports that Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Florida arranged to sell their health insurance cards and medical care discount cards through Winn-Dixie because of a commonality in target markets.
  • Keep a local angle, especially if you are teaming up with a large business known to be headquartered in another area. This is even more important if you are yourself a large retailer also known to be headquartered in another area. Last fall, Stop & Shop and Giant Food, both of them parts of Dutch conglomerate Royal Ahold, announced that Starbucks kiosks in a number of stores would be replaced with another coffee supplier, Dunkin' Donuts, whose home is Canton, Massachusetts. That's much closer to the Stop & Shop/Giant stores than Starbucks, which is most strongly associated with Seattle.

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