While every retailer has been obsessed with the customer experience – what it means to them, how to deliver it across channels – grocery retailers have had a certain new fervor about the future of the customer experience, thanks to Amazon’s acquisition of Whole Foods and the opening of the Amazon Go store. All the dismissive hand-waving that grocery is hard, takes a lot of assets and business relationships, and requires a certain amount of intestinal fortitude in order to live with razor-thin margins – that has all been wiped out because of those two specific moves by Amazon, which, if we’re being honest, came after years of Amazon sniffing around grocery and making incremental gains in the business.
With grocery’s new interest in redefining their own customer experience strategy, I thought it would be worth taking a look at the “state of the art” when it comes to the grocery customer experience. I found six big trends, and yes, cashierless stores is on the list.
1. Lab Stores
Lab stores in grocery don’t look like lab stores in other verticals, because grocery is ultimately all about food. There are two types of lab stores emerging in grocery. The first is more focused on products and brands. KaDeTe is a good example, where a retailer has created a store for offering new and emerging brands. They treat it in part as a consumer research facility, helping new brands to learn about the consumer behaviors and opinions that might drive the future success of their products. For consumers they get the benefits of a curated selection of “cool” new products – playing into a lot of consumers’ desires to be the first to try, or the influencer who always knows about popular items before everyone else does.
To read the rest of the story, please go to: Forbes
