Grocery Store Darwinism

I don’t know how common this knowledge is, but no one told me about this in design school, so I’ll oversimplify here:

A sales guy I worked with (who also made incredible burritos) said a smart store manager thinks about their store as real estate. It’s a limited amount of space, so how much is each square foot “worth”? When you factor in price and how fast the product “turns” (velocity), how can you optimize for the most value for each square foot? A store’s “growth” is predicated upon this question.

This quickly gets complicated when you have big conglomerates (like Pepsico) that can offer deals on Lays potato chips to support their new beverage innovation or a new twist of Quaker oatmeal. They’re boosting the profit on this square footage over here to cover the risk for this new thing over here. This is a pretty effective way to box out new brands, too.

New brands, beyond showing the guy that runs the store that they taste and look nice, also need to prove that they’re getting the word out about themselves. Are they running deals to get folks to just try the darn thing? Are they investing in shelf-danglers or fridge stickers or signage so people know they exist? Are they running ad campaigns? This helps temper the feeling of risk the store buyer is committing to.

HOWEVER. They probably won’t give a fresh, new brand that really PRIME real estate (eye-level shelves or end-caps) until they prove that people will buy them. So, what can happen (what happened to a brand I worked on) is people have seen the ad, they want to try your delicious product, they even know what store you’re in, but they CAN’T FIND THE PRODUCT. You’ve been relegated to a bottom shelf and stuck with two “facings,” so you sit there gathering dust.

As designers, this isn’t a lens we necessarily look through all the time. But it’s worth thinking through because your client sure has.