From The Summer 2005 Issue of Natural Grocery Buyer

A matter of choice: Is more better?

Kevin Coupe

There is a wonderful moment in the classic 1952 Spencer Tracy-Katharine Hepburn movie Pat and Mike in which Tracy, playing a sportswriter, appraises golf pro Hepburn and says, “Not much meat on her, but what’s there is ‘cherce.’”

That’s a great scene with tons of subtext, because it points out the difference between quality and quantity. In the food retailing business, where sometimes it seems as if new products hit the shelves every day, the preference has been for quantity—as if the sheer barrage of SKUs will blind shoppers to what is lacking on the part of manufacturers and retailers.

The importance and the perils of new product introductions will be two of the major topics of discussion at the May 1 to 3 Food Marketing Institute show in Chicago, and it is a discussion to which natural and organic marketers need to pay attention. While the scenarios being experienced by the mainstream grocery industry and the natural/organic business aren’t exactly the same, there certainly is the possibility of parallels, and therefore, experience may be the best teacher.

As the natural/organic business grows—and it continues to be one of the real shining stars in the food retailing industry—manufacturers and retailers will have to face the nature and importance of choice. That’s something that, quite frankly, more mainstream retailers and manufacturers ought to think about, but they’re locked into an old-school way of thinking that is hard to deviate from. “More is more” is the approach they accept as being gospel, but I’m not sure that’s the best way of looking at things.

Let me give you an example. Two of my favorite food stores in the United States actually have opposite views of the importance of choice—and they both work. One is Jungle Jim’s International Market in Fairfield, Ohio. Jungle Jim’s is a single-store operation, but what an operation it is, carrying more than 125,000 SKUs in an enormous facility that is billed as an “ingredient store,” which itself takes some nerve in a retailing environment where convenience and solutions-oriented marketing has been the norm. But no, Jungle Jim’s has everything you could possibly need to make anything you could possibly want. And when Jungle Jim Bonaminio, the store’s founder, can’t find the product offerings he’s looking for, he’ll take the unconventional approach. When he was dissatisfied with the freshness of the fish he was getting from his supplier, he spent upwards of $80,000 to install a fish farm on the premises, so the fish could spawn and be about as fresh as possible to shoppers.

The other approach is taken by Stew Leonard’s, a Connecticut-based retailer that does more than $2 million a week in sales out of one of its three stores—and does so with just about 1,000 SKUs. The emphasis is on fresh product—bakery, meat, seafood and produce. Even the milk is about as fresh as can be, since the store has been built up around an actual dairy. There’s little in the way of branded product and usually just a few SKUs of any given offering. Stew Leonard’s essentially tells shoppers that it makes the choices for them, offering just the best products and values in every category.

Which approach is best? Well, that depends on what kind of retailer you are and what kind of customer you serve. It may be that in your store, there should be a plethora of offerings in one category and very few in another. It all depends on your strategy.

But this is important. You have to have a strategy when it comes to choice. You have to have made a decision about what your position will be in terms of the depth and breadth of your selection. Not making a decision is something like being on a sailboat with no rudder. You drift, you have no control, and you end up being blown in the shipping lanes and mowed down by a much bigger freighter (which probably hails from Arkansas … but that’s another story).

Barry Schwartz, professor of social theory and social action at Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania, has written a book titled The Paradox of Choice: Why More is Less (HarperCollins, 2004), in which he describes “the tyranny of choice”—how consumers are paralyzed by the bewildering array of choices in the marketplace. He’s scheduled to speak at one of FMI’s “Super Sessions,” and I tracked him down in advance to chat about his hypothesis

I asked him who is responsible for this plethora of choices, and Schwartz told me he thinks it’s marketers, not consumers—even though marketers take refuge in the notion that they only give the customers what they want.

People, he says, seem to “prefer the idea of more choice to less, but then when you give them what they ask for, they suffer.” What marketers have to do, he says, “is pay attention to customers and ask them how much is too much. It may well vary from one product line to another.”

Coupe’s Super Session at FMI At the 2005 FMI Show in Chicago, Kevin Coupe will moderate a Super Session panel discussion on “New Products: A View Forward” from 8:15 to 11 a.m. Monday, May 2 at McCormick Place. Joan Holleran of Stagnito’s New Products Magazine, Lyn Dornblazer of Mintel and Valerie Skala-Walker of Information Resources Inc. will review last year’s new products and help retailers predict the success of this year’s crop. For more information, www.fmishow.com.

In other words, don’t accept the conventional wisdom that more is more. As the natural/organic industry grows, the temptation may be to just let the torrent of new natural products flow into supermarkets, just as new conventional products tend to do. I think this would be a mistake, if for no other reason than it may serve only to overwhelm and confuse the customer.

Shoppers who walk into a natural/ organic store have already made the decision to choose a food store that offers certain differential advantages, a store that has made certain choices for them (to carry healthier products than the conventional chain down the road). To win the crossover customer, take advantage of that mindset by being specific about the products and categories you carry. Help consumers make smart decisions by making some of those decisions for them.

The vast majority of shoppers, I suspect, will appreciate the effort and repay it with the kind of loyalty that less discriminating retailers can only dream about. After all, what matters is that the choice is ‘cherce.’”

Kevin Coupe covers the retail business on his Web site, www.morningnewsbeat.com. Reach him at kc@morningnewsbeat.com.