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Tesco Posts
Gosh! Strawberry bonbons! It’s like the tuck shop all over again…
November 5th, 2009
Childhood.
My prep school was a Harry Potter-type place – it was great fun. It was a boarding school in the depths of Yorkshire where I was sent for months on end.
At the age of 8, my parents took me up to London to Kings Cross station at the beginning of each term to catch the school train. Grey shorts, shirt and tie with flannel jacket, with a cap on my head – trunk and tuck box in tow.
We caused havoc all the way to Yorkshire on our ‘Hogwarts Express’, throwing fireworks out of the window as we passed each station.
And my parents thought they were giving us the best education possible…. I loved it!
On a Sunday afternoon we were allowed down to the tuck shop where big jars of sweets were stacked along shelves. Sherbet dib dabs, strawberry bonbons, chocolate mice, sheets of toffee and home made fudge, each weighed out and put into little paper bags as we spent our precious pocket money. This was Billy Bunter stuff.
And it’s back! It seems that the recession has prompted a fit of nostalgia in old fashioned tuck-shop treats.
The downturn has fuelled a demand in comfort foods (Tesco report a 200% rise in demand for sirloin steak). M+S has reported a 350% surge in demand for sugary confectionary – wine gums, fizzy cola bottles and rhubarb creams are now all the rage.
The demise of Woolworths ‘pick and mix’ in the UK plus the recession has led to a 9% growth in the sector, set to be worth £2bn in 2010.
So get down to M+S or House of Fraser for your tuck!
But don’t buy liquorice. Liquorice was for losers.
Do your research before going International – Tesco got it wrong
February 23rd, 2009
Yesterday’s Sunday Times ran an article which began ‘Tesco admits: we got it wrong in the US’.
Tesco. The one company that doesn’t make mistakes. The company that drove a customer loyalty program to beat all others, boasting that it knew every minutae of millions of shoppers’ habits in the UK. It knew its customers buying patterns so well that it could market product at the right time of the day and in the right part of the store.
So what went wrong in the US? It seems that they didn’t take enough time to find out about their customers in this new market. Maybe they just thought they could apply the same models again.
But that’s the key with International growth – it’s an old cliche but it really is a question of ‘Think Global, Act Local’. Make sure you get to know your target markets passionately.
So what went wrong with Tesco?
It seems that their US operation, Fresh and Easy got its early market research wrong. Marketing Director, Simon Uwins said ‘we went into people’s houses, talked to them about food and food shopping. We went into kitchens and poked around pantries’. This was all before the launch of 113 stores on the West Coast.
Unfortunately, he now admits, they didn’t go into the garage where they would have found huge chest freezers full of stockpiled meat bought on special offer. In the US, it seems, consumers are driven by the weekly ’special offer flyers’ so common in US food retailing. Tesco missed this and didnt realise the market was so driven on price and tactical manoeuvering – they have suffered and now have put the full roll out of 200 stores on hold for 6 months.
So the lesson is simple – make sure that every new market is researched fully. It doesn’t naturally follow that the same format will work in all.