Morrisons Media Group (MMG) is launching food and drink sampling in stores across the UK to help customers discover new and exciting products before they buy.
Brands can now book in-aisle sampling activity for the autumn, working closely with the MMG team to select the right supermarkets from the hundreds available across the Morrisons estate.
This is the latest move from MMG in providing brands with exciting ways to introduce their products to new customers.
Lee LeFeuvre, Chief Commercial Officer at SMG who run Morrisons Media Group (MMG) in partnership with Morrisons, tells Grocery Trader more about the sampling and about other ways in which MMG works with brands to introduce their products to consumers.
Why is Morrisons Media Group launching food and drink sampling in stores at this time?
If you think about the Morrisons shopper, we know that 70% of them broadly are more likely to buy a product if they can interact with it first. So the Kantar data that we get access to tells us that when they’re shopping in store, they’re actually seeking the opportunity to touch and feel products.
A third of those shoppers are highly engaged with experiential. So, when they’re in other stores, they’re saying that they enjoy that part of the experience of going to shop. Now, there is a balance of making sure you put the right product in the right shop at the right time, which has to be right when you launch this sort of thing. But Morrisons Media Group has been launched to make generically the experience for customers once they move through store a better one, whether that’s giving them information on brands, whether it’s giving them information on price, whether it’s giving information on NPD and obviously, sampling and NPD are two areas that are knitted quite closely together. I work with hundreds of FMCG brands every year, and you know almost every single one of them has NPD in the plan, but that NPD will only be successful if we put it in the hands of the people that need to buy it, and that they come back and buy it time and time again.
So, this is to help support the demand that we know is there and meet the need of the shopper that we know is also there. Hopefully it should enrich everybody’s experience.
Are you able to tell me some of the brands that will be involved in the sampling?
We have got a few already lined up: Treasury Wines, Upfield, Kenvue and Euro Food Brands. We’re going to be live across both fresh and ambient, which is great. And the interest seems really strong. During the pandemic, sampling as a channel wasn’t available. I think there’s a genuine demand from brands to be able to use this tool in-store again. I’m really pleased that the likes of those brands which we have a relationship with as a business outside of Morrisons, are looking to take advantage of it.
How many Morrisons outlets will be used for the sampling and what’s the geographical reach?
As with most things, you don’t switch on the light, and it goes across the entire store footprint overnight. The sampling will be available at 40 stores at the start, across England, Wales and Scotland. We will be scaling that, but 40 stores is the starting point with good geographical coverage within each of those respective countries. In terms of picking those stores, there’s a few things that we’ll look at to make sure they are the right ones. We will first of all look at footfall to see how many people are going through those doors every day, each week. Obviously, we look at sales data, but then, importantly, overlaying the availability. The worst thing that you can do is have a great sampling experience, and then you’ve got one fascia at the front of the shop. It needs to be the right depth of distribution. So those three elements will be considered as we pick the right stores for the platform.
How do you guys find the right supermarkets for the brands to sample their products?
I think it’s very much connected to what I said a moment ago on footfall, sales and availability. We do also have our proprietary software, plan apps that has a bunch of data by category. We’ll overlay any intelligence that we can take from that software to make sure that we are essentially selecting the right stores for the proposition. But equally, the beauty of this is that you can learn as you go. As we scale from 40 up to 80, up to 120 it might be that those stores that we use start to change. So we won’t just stick with those same 40. We might say out of the 40, 30 of them are really good for Category A or Category B, and actually aren’t brilliant for Category C. Therefore, we need to adjust and change as we move through the rollout. We’re prepared for that. That isn’t something that we haven’t done elsewhere. There’s hundreds of stores, so we need to make sure that we’re putting the proposition in the right stores, and use the full cell data and that availability to inform it.
What other ways does MMG use to work with brands to introduce their products to consumers?
Morrisons Media Group was launched to become a one front door for marketing for brands at Morrisons, it launched just a couple of years ago. It’s got online, it’s got off site, and obviously the in-store sampling experience. As we stand today, we’ve got about 125 media channels available to brands, which is very competitive, versus the likes of a Tesco, versus the likes of a Sainsbury’s, it is way up there. We’ve also got those targeting opportunities like supporting the More card, which is their loyalty programme, digital screens, which will be taken over by sponsored products. So, you know, we purposely tried to create a media offer that offers depth, value and credibility and by that, I mean measurable returns. For every campaign that a brand books through the Morrisons Media Group, they get an insight report that tells them exactly what it did and didn’t do, and therefore we use that intelligence to then make sure that the next campaign we book is even smarter and delivers better for them.
How are digital screens at Morrisons Market Street food counters, trolley media and the ‘My Points Boosters’ trial performing at the moment?
As a rule we are seeing good performance. The Market Street schemes, as an example, has absolutely been a really popular channel, and it is relatively unique to Morrisons. There aren’t any other retailers doing that to my knowledge at this time, their featured SKU ROI is £1.51 and the average impressions per campaign through that channel is around 5 million. It is measured via our proprietary software plan apps.
I don’t have specific numbers on points booster for you, but it has proved popular. We haven’t got the data because we’re still working through the results of the campaign for this page. We allow for a post period after each campaign, so we’re still in that for some of those campaigns.
We are receiving real positivity within the market from trolley media , which is great. Why are we getting that? Well, it’s got high reach. It’s got high compliance. If you think about your average trip to a big grocer, this isn’t a convenience shop. You’re not popping in for top-up shopping. You’re often going with a list, and you’re going to be in there for 20-35 minutes. We know broadly that customers within Morrisons are spending 35 minutes on average in that store. That means that the return for those brands on that media channel specifically is really positive.
What are the benefits to brands of sponsoring products your E commerce site?
Three areas, flexibility, agility and control, is the way that I would summarize it. Let’s talk about flexibility. The self serve platform allows brands to manage the pace of their campaigns, the products that they feature and the timing the campaign. In-flight reporting, being able to optimize your campaign whilst it’s live is what most FMCG CPGs are looking for. If a campaign isn’t working, you want to do something about it. Our job is to make sure we do our very best to make it successful, but also adjust it if we see opportunities to do so.
Agility is about the lead time – if you think about sending something to store, or a sampling campaign, these things take just a little bit more time. There’s print lead times that need to be considered with sampling. You need to order the product; you need to find the talent to be able to do that job really well. We are partnered with a very well-respected agency to do that.
In terms of control, the self platform gives brands everything they need in their hands to access, see, adjust in flight, which gives everybody an opportunity to ensure that they are doing the very best job they can. Is there anything else you wanted to add?
It feels like Morrisons Media Group has really started to make a difference to the way that brands work with Morrisons, which has always been the objective, but I would equally say there’s still lots to do, and we’re looking forward to continue our partnership with both Morrisons and the brands to do that.
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