How Well Do You Know Your Shopper? How Better Insights Lead to Better Grocery

Grocery is a tough-margin business — and it's only getting tougher. Competition is intensifying, shopper expectations are rising, and the decisions regarding what to range, how to price and which promotions to run are more critical than ever. 

There’s no shortage of experience among marketing, merchandising and category teams. Most of the time, they make good decisions. In today’s fast-moving retail environment, however, “good” isn’t good enough. 

To be more competitive, teams need real-time access to deep customer insights. That means being able to explore the vast volumes of data that grocers already collect but often don’t fully use. 

Better access to data means better decisions. It helps teams understand their shoppers’ behavior more clearly and act with greater precision. While loyalty programs are designed to do this, they often fall short, producing lots of noise without delivering the behavioral insights decision-makers really need. 

One of the biggest challenges is simply getting insights into the hands of the right people. The data is there, but parsing and analyzing it is beyond the scope of many frontline users. Grocers typically use several approaches to mine their data for insights: 

• Use SQL and Excel, supported by specialists from an internal analytics team, which is flexible but tends to result in bottlenecks due to the limited number of analysts relative to the number of requests.
• Engage external retail analytics consultants. These firms bring deep expertise, but they’re costly, and the knowledge remains outside the organization.
• Extend dashboards to surface key data points. Dashboards are essential but tend to be shallow: They answer the first question, but not the three that follow. 

The reality is that behavioral insights are rarely one-dimensional. A single question leads to another, and then another. Unless users can drive the exploration themselves, they’re left with only half the picture — and half the insight. 

The result? Most teams operate in an insight-constrained environment. Promotions underperform. Ranging decisions miss the mark. Loyalty programs fail to deliver ROI. All of it hits gross margin.