Retailers Savor Insights from Dreyer's

Oak Brook, Ill. -- A focused shopper insights strategy helped the Dreyer's Grand Ice Cream divison of Nestle USA claim new category advisor seats at top retailers and expose several merchandising "tribal myths" the company had held for years, said Russ Onish, the company's national director of category development & shopper insights.Onish joined John Dranow, president & CEO of research consultancy SmartRevenue, in an In-Store Marketing Summit presentation highlighting their recent research into shopping behaviors unique to the ice cream category.Dreyer's mines a wide range of data sets to develop shopper insights, including syndicated and panel data, consumer segmentation modeling and loyalty card analytics, Onish said. Research projects typically originate from the central office in Oakland, CA. These more "generic" insights get passed along to customer marketing and category development teams across the country, which further refine the ideas to suit their individual accounts."We have the ability of moving along the continuum from research project to insight, and I then hand it off to the customer marketing team," Onish said. "They then tailor it based on their knowledge of the customer to come up with dead-on recommendations for that customer."The company produces "Frameworks" documents to reduce the complexity of research learnings and communicate them across the organization. Frameworks cover a variety of topics, such as the path-to-purchase and consumer segmentation. The top-level framework is the "Category Growth Roadmap," which is Dreyer's articulation of how retail customers can grow their ice cream businesses. Onish insists that the preparation of these documents is critical in moving the company's research from purely theoretical to actionable in the field. Among more recent initiatives, Dreyer's worked with SmartRevenue to develop a "Behaviors of the Shopper" framework relying on both quantitative and ethnographic research. The results challenged several flawed assumptions about ice cream merchandising."Other than a few shop-alongs, we really didn't get into the store to do the homework we needed to do," Onish said. "Consequently, our organization had a number of 'tribal myths' about what the ice cream shopping experience was all about." One myth was that ice cream is an impulse category requiring a merchandising strategy similar to chips, cookies and candy. But the study found that ice cream is a highly planned purchase, with 81% of supermarket shoppers planning a category purchase ahead of time. Of that 81%, 54% said they also knew the brand they were going to select, while 27% said they selected the brand at the shelf. The study found that 27% of shoppers noticed special endcap displays for ice cream, which is higher than some categories but much lower than Dreyer's had hoped. But rather than shop the display (only 10% of those noticing the endcap made a purchase), shoppers tended to use the display as a wayfinding device, with 48% stating that it played at least a moderate role in getting them to go down the aisle. Many shoppers preferred shopping the full selection in the aisle (47%) or reported that the endcap didn't have the brands they wanted (27%).Perhaps most alarming, the research found that 40% of people who actually intended to buy ice cream left the store without buying it. Despite the fact that many stores carry 500 ice cream SKUs spanning nearly 20 freezer doors, nearly 60% of those who didn't buy said that they couldn't find the item they were looking for (31%) or the flavor they wanted (28%). "There is an overabundance of selection, and people just give up," Onish said. Though in some ways sobering, the study enabled Dreyer's to bring forth a wide variety of specific recommendations to retailers on how to improve pre-store communication, endcap display execution and merchandising programs. The efforts have helped the company get a more prominent role as category advisors to leading retailers."Last year, Walgreens ... moved to Dreyer's to be category advisor. Kroger moved to us. Wegman's moved to us," Onish said. "It's really right on strategy for us to be the 'go-to' resource for our retail customers."

Retailers Savor Insights from Dreyer's

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