Morning Brew - ☕ A loyal welcome

Kroger, Ferrara, and loyalty.
October 28, 2024

Retail Brew

It’s Monday, and let’s start the week on a cheesy note with a report from London that a thief posing as a food distributor managed to steal nearly 1,000 wheels of artisanal cheddar cheese weighing more than 48,000 pounds and valued at $390,000. On Instagram, British celebrity chef Jamie Oliver called the heist the “grate cheese robbery.”

In today’s edition:

—Erin Cabrey, Alex Vuocolo, Andrew Adam Newman

MARKETING

The loyal treatment

Groceryshop Kroger Ferrara Groceryshop

As inflated grocery prices have sent shoppers heading to different retailers and switching to private labels to cross everything off their lists, getting consumers to keep coming back to the same retailers and brands has become a loyal pain.

From personalization to new innovations, Stuart Aitken, chief merchant and marketing officer at Kroger, and Gregory Guidotti, CMO at Ferrara Candy Company, owner of brands like Nerds, Trolli, and SweeTarts, have found several ways to effectively engage wayward shoppers. Retail Brew sat down with Aitken and Ferrara at Groceryshop in Las Vegas earlier this month to discuss how consumers’ needs are shifting and the top strategies they’re employing to keep them coming back.

Keep reading here.—EC

   

From The Crew

Investing news, Brew style

The Crew

STORES

Back from the dead

zombies Gremlin/Getty Images

When inventory is declared dead, retailers can find themselves in a spooky situation. Without some kind of afterlife planned for these products, whether in a resale market or a landfill, they become what some in the industry call a “zombie SKU."

“It’s inventory that’s not going anywhere,” Kate Klemmer Terry, chief commerce officer at third-party logistics provider Outerspace, told Retail Brew. “It’s not selling for a variety of reasons. It never sold in the first place, or it came back and it’s now in need of refurbishing, or it’s passed its life cycle.”

She said Outerspace, which specializes in serving apparel, beauty, and home goods brands, is like a lot of 3PLs in that it doesn’t want to waste valuable space on products that are not moving, because it would rather get paid for outbound shipment than storage. Where it hopes to differentiate itself is in working directly with retailers to bring that inventory back from the dead.

Keep reading here.—AV

   

RETAIL

Beat the parents

A toddler laughs while playing in a pile of wrapping paper. Solstock/Getty Images

For parents of kids under 18, here’s one thing they may get this holiday season that they didn’t ask for: A dip in their credit rating.

Nearly 4 in 10 parents (38%) expect to take on more debt than usual buying gifts, thanks to cultural expectations and the beseeching eyes of their progeny. Almost half (48%) of parents report feeling the need to keep up with the Joneses, often spending more on holiday gifts than they think they probably should.

Those are some of the findings of a Harris Poll conducted in September on behalf of NerdWallet.

Keep reading here.—AAN

   

SWAPPING SKUS

Today’s top retail reads.

Chain smoker: Chain stores are on pace to close more stores this year than they have since 2020. (CNN)

Claw and order: California officials delayed the Dungeness crab fishing season for the seventh consecutive year to protect humpback whales from being entangled. (ABC News)

Like nada for chocolate: How high cocoa prices may translate to increased gummy and fruity candy sales this Halloween. (the Washington Post)

HOT TOPIC

At the mall, it’s where band tees are the only tees. In Retail Brew, it’s where we invite readers to weigh in on a trending retail topic.

As part of its loyalty program, along with purchases, Australian surfwear brand Rip Curl awards points for every wave that loyalty club members catch. Antavo Loyalty Cloud, Rip Curl's partner in the effort, calls such a strategy “emotional loyalty,” in contrast to the “rational loyalty” of awarding points when customers spend money. Other non-transactional actions that brands increasingly are awarding loyalty points for are referring friends, subscribing to newsletters, and writing product reviews.

You tell us: Do you think it’s a good strategy for brands to award loyalty points for actions besides purchases? Cast your vote here.

Circling back: Last time, we told you that the rate of designer products that authenticators identified as fake rose to 8.8% in 2023, up from 7.2% the year before—a 20% increase, according to an AI authentication solutions company. So we asked if you ever intentionally or unintentionally purchased a product that was fake.

Nearly half (47.3%) of you told us you’ve intentionally purchased a product that was a fake, while 40% of you said that, as far as you know, you never have. Another 10.9% told us you accidentally purchased a designer product that you thought was authentic but turned out to be fake, while 1.8% didn’t know or weren’t sure.

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