Anyone who’s had profit and loss responsibilities for a produce retail operation might recall a time when you've stared down the real possibility of missing your sales budget.
Those can be some uncomfortable times — particularly, if your category miss is causing the entire department to miss. It makes me think of a scene in a horror flick where one person is at the far end of a table, and a group of angry people are piling up at the other end, with their faces moving toward their victim’s face as they get ready to pounce.
Okay, maybe I’ve watched a few too many horror movies in my spare time, but that’s exactly how I recall feeling.
More times than not, the antidote to certain budgetary doom was to quickly negotiate a great price on a whole lot of strawberries. There are very few products in the produce department that can generate large amounts of incremental sales quite like strawberries can.
The key here is "incremental." There is no sense in trading the sales of one produce item for another like you get with many vegetables, or in advancing the sales from a future week into the present like you get with many of the produce staples.
To get yourself out of a budgetary quagmire, you need to manufacture new, incremental sales. And strawberries accomplish that goal better than just about any item in produce.
Learn more about strawberries.
If you’re like me, once you’ve stared down the barrel of a missed budget, you’ll do whatever you can to make sure you endure that pain as infrequently as possible.
While strawberries are great at bailing you out of an imminent disaster, they’re also great at keeping you out of harm’s way to begin with. A plan that includes a consistent dose of strawberry promotions, without overpromoting, is a great way to keep the budget wolves at bay.
And to get the most bang for your buck, it makes sense to get to know your strawberry customer better, allowing you to fine-tune your promo strategy.
Two traits separate strawberry customers from all the rest, according to recent Execulytics consumer research, and it’s possible to capitalize on both:
- Strawberry customers are more than twice as likely to be influenced by product branding when making purchase decisions; and
- They are nearly two and a half times more likely to be influenced by social media.
Highlighting a brand when promoting strawberries in flyers or online, plus using your company’s social media accounts to communicate the promotion, will improve the effectiveness of an already highly effective plan.
Whether you require a finely constructed bailout plan or want a fool-proof, budget-safe strategy, strawberries are a sound choice. Next time though, try offering your customer a brand they know, and communicate it on the social media platforms they follow. It might just lead you into the seat that does the staring.
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