Marketing and Grocery Shopping

For my first entry in my marketing blog, I wanted to record something ordinary, such as grocery shopping. Actually, it is quite interesting to see how marketing has been involved in grocery shopping.

Where do you buy your groceries? Personally, I always buy groceries in 3 places, T&T Market, Safeway and the little shop next to my house. I want to focus on Safeway today because there are a lot of marketing concepts that we covered in class which can be noticed in Safeway.

First, Safeway uses a ‘club card’ to increase their customers’ loyalty. I know other supermarkets do that too (Save on foods for example). However, I think Safeway does a better job than most others. From the receipt, you can clearly see how much you save with each purchase by using your Safeway card. Refer this to the concept of “Perceived value.” I personally feel that shopping at Safeway saves me a lot of money because I can see the ‘amount saved’ at the bottom of my receipt every time I cash out. I know it is a marketing strategy.

Besides its own loyalty card, Safeway is also the partner of Air Miles. If you are a member of Safeway, I believe you have received emails like this:

Or if you go into any Safeway store, you can always see something like this:

I do not know how many Air Miles users are in Canada, but I believe that this program helps Safeway attract numerous customers, and increase its revenue as well.

In fact, I compared price between Safeway and Superstore and found out that Safeway’s price is not competitive at all even after discounts. But it is undeniably working on me.