How grocers can up their game with digital visual merchandising
Born and raised in New York, Michael Silverman spent a big part of his career in consumer technology before moving to Canada to lead Flipp in helping North America’s largest retailers and brands transform their digital merchandising strategies. Based in Toronto, the company works with its partners (many of which are grocers) to create, curate and distribute local promotional and savings content to millions of shoppers every day. Here, Silverman shares his insights on how digital visual merchandising is changing the shopper experience and what retailers need to thrive in the digital age.
How has shopping changed in this digital age?
People have been shifting online to shop for a long time, and COVID-19 further accelerated that to the point where online is becoming the largest research centre for the shopper. However, the online experience, especially for high-frequency retailers like grocers, is still at a disadvantage because you don’t get to engage all your senses as you would in-store. Though grocery e-commerce has grown dramatically over the last four years, the majority of shopping still happens in-store. Still, Canadians are spending a little less time in-store and a lot more time online figuring out where they’re going to shop and what they’re going to buy.
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What does that mean in terms of how products are merchandized?
The four Ps of traditional merchandising still hold true: product, placement, pricing and promotion. But, in the throes of a challenging macroeconomic climate, pricing and promotion are the largest influencing factors right now. So, we’re working to create an amazing shopping experience by helping shoppers make informed decisions, while also helping retailers create demand. With our platform, we help our high-frequency retailers capture the attention of a shopper online and then convert them to in-store through digital visual merchandising.
What does that entail?
It all hinges on our ability to help the shopper understand and contextualize the product, whether that’s with 360-degree views, great metadata descriptions (i.e. height, width, weight, etc.) and bright visuals that easily show them what’s on sale. The early days of traditional e-commerce grids with rows and rows of austere products on white backgrounds no longer fit. It’s about contextualizing the product and instead of a picture of a raw protein on sale, it’s important to see the burger you’ll make out of it and the picnic that can be created as a result.
Where does artificial intelligence (AI) come into play?
I think it boils down to optimization. Whether it’s a planogram in-store or some form of promotional activity, AI is supercharging a retailer’s ability to optimize, target and then subsequently personalize the experience. There are always going to be some limitations due to legislative privacy laws, etc., but personalization is going to become more and more important. That said, I don’t expect AI to revolutionize the interaction between the shopper and retailer but rather to help retailers stay ahead of the curve to become market leaders.
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Where do loyalty programs fit in?
There are some shopper loyalists for whom these programs are very important. But, the vast majority of consumers are looking across retailers and it’s about leveraging advances in AI and digital to win that shopper’s attention and drive them in-store to buy more and have a great shopping experience.
What’s the advantage of using a platform such as Flipp for grocers?
At the end of the day, your data is the most critical asset you can invest in. We have a platform where we see across retailers and shoppers … so, we have huge sums of data that we leverage on behalf of retailers to help them influence shopping decisions. [In the U.S.] the Krogers and Safeways of the world have made massive investments in data infrastructure and that’s why they’ve become such successful players in the retail media landscape. Your data is sitting somewhere, whether it’s in your loyalty programs or in inventory management solutions … and one of the things we’ve become great at is helping our retailers clean up some of this data and better access and leverage it.
This article was first published in Canadian Grocer’s November 2024 issue.
