A few years ago I wrote about the brilliance of supermarkets.
Not in the sense that it offers a one-stop-shop to get all your food requirements, but in how it combines products that you don’t think should go together, but do.
I called this romantic notion strategy but the reality is it’s simply understanding either the breadth of a persons character or the requirements of a particular audience.
To be honest, I’m underselling both those approaches because while it may appear obvious, it’s scary how few companies – and agencies – make those connections and yet the result of them is genuine brand differentiation, true audience connection and incremental sales.
Well I recently saw another area that supermarkets are great at and that is spotting implications of a particular purchase and offering remedies.
OK, so this is not so new – but whereas places like Amazon offer ‘similar purchase alternatives’ [under the banner of, ‘people who bought this also bought this’], supermarkets offer real product partners as demonstrated by this Asda in Derby.
Yep, some headache pills in the booze section of the store.
Not a massive leap, but simple and effective and – arguably – far more noticeable and inviting than expecting people to go to the medicine aisle and buy them without any prod.
It’s amazing how often we forget the most obvious approaches in the quest of being smart … which ironically, shows how un-smart we can be.
The only thing I’m trying to work out is whether this says more about the customers who shop at Asda or the people who live in Derby.