NEW YORK, NY — Grocery stores and food manufacturers need to reassess traditional approaches to shopper marketing, according to the just-released "Food Shopper Insights: Grocery Shopping Patterns in the U.S." by market research publisher Packaged Facts.
Packaged Facts' March 2011 Food Shopper Insights Survey — which polled 2,000 adults who had shopped for groceries within the past 24 hours — shows that a substantial proportion of grocery shopping trips were organized around narrowly focused missions, such as purchasing items needed for the next few days or picking up groceries shoppers had run out of. One in three were shopping to buy what they needed for a specific meal or recipe, one in five were picking up food in a grocery store rather than using fast food, and one in ten went grocery shopping because of "being hungry." Given the prevalence of narrower missions rather than pantry-stock goals, half of grocery shoppers spent less than $50 and bought fewer than 15 items on their most recent grocery shopping trips.
Even though food shoppers often are operating within a short time horizon, grocery shopping remains an activity that involves preparation. A substantial majority of grocery shoppers do some kind of planning beforehand, such as making a shopping list, gathering coupons, looking for product or sale information or looking for menu or recipe ideas. This preliminary preparation provides an opening where conventional grocery marketing increasingly falls short. For example, traditional promotional circulars and flyers reach only 21% of all grocery shoppers prior to their most recent grocery shopping trip.
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