Norrelle Goldring from ShopAbility examines the role of offpremise fridge layouts in gaining impulse and tradeup sales of Low Carb and other beers. For Drinks Magazine.
Ian Kingham’s mini-tasting of low carb beers got me thinking about how to drive shopper exploration of low carb beers, where they should go in the fridge and thus about beer fridge layouts more broadly.
Sure the beer fridge layouts should be laid out in a way that makes sense for shoppers, but can you use the layout to get active uptrade or even impulse?
Below are some thoughts on different ways to lay out the beer fridges in a bottleshop, and their pros and cons.
How shoppers shop fridges
It will vary a bit by store layout and the angle/direction from which they approach the fridges, but generally shoppers tend to ‘read’ fridge doors like they read a newspaper. That is, diagonally from top left to bottom right, a bit like the below.
This means that there are some dead spots in the fridge, generally the bottom left and the top right.
However, this is mitigated a little because shoppers will generally look a little to the right of their intended purchase (rather than to the left). So when launching new products, in order to be seen they should generally go slightly to the right of the biggest selling or destination products.
Shoppers spend most time in front of or browsing the middle to right hand side fridge doors. Assuming a 6 door and 6 shelf layout, the most heavily browsed shelf and door areas looks like the below.
Conventional wisdom would have it that shelf 2 – the ‘eye level’ (‘buy level’) shelf – is the key shelf but as seen in the above there are actually a number of ‘pole’ positions.
So the question is, do you put your destination products (eg VB longnecks, top selling domestic premium 6 packs) in the most browsed space, use it to try to turn around a declining category segment, or do you use the most browsed space to introduce new products, for fastest growing category segments or to get tradeup?
Do you:
a) go with what’s easiest for the shopper or
b) what might get you a better sales result?
In our view it’s b). An example is mainstream longneck beers. Shoppers of these destination products will find them in the fridge regardless of where you put them (generally the bottom two shelves). They don’t need to occupy the primary browse zone as these types of destination products aren’t browsed anyway.
Beer Category Segmentation, Flow & Adjacency Options
Let’s assume for simplicity that the beer category has six segments from the shopper’s point of view:
- Mid Strength (including Light)
- Low Carb
- Mainstream domestic heavy
- Domestic premiums
- Craft
- Imported.
(Dark and flavoured beers would sit in their appropriate segment eg Guinness in Imported).
There are a number of ways to look at how to group the segments, but the main ones are probably:
- By potency/ABV: but there’s not much ABV difference among Mainstream, Domestic Premium beers and many Craft and Imports have roughly the same ABVs as Mainstream beers
- By ‘premiumness’: where Mid and Mainstream beers sit together, Low Carb and Domestic Premium sit together, and Imported/Craft sit together
- By brand or supplier: which generally makes the least sense to shoppers unless it’s a sparse category with only a few brands in it. Again brand blocking may make sense for destination purchase items and for shoppers rusted onto a specific brand (the minority), but the reality is most beer shoppers have a repertoire.
Let’s look at how these options might play out in fridge door layouts.
We’ll assume for simplicity that there are 6 doors each with 6 shelves and that each door is a category segment (eg each segment has equal sales and therefore equal space). Each door contains a combination of pack sizes (stubby singles, longnecks, 6 packs) rather than there being longneck-specific or stubby-specific doors. It won’t be this neat in real life obviously, but you’ve got to start somewhere.
Layout by Potency/ABV
Assumes that Low Carb has the lowest perceived abv and that craft beers have the highest perceived abvs.
This layout puts Low Carb at a disadvantage because Door 1 traditionally has least browse traffic (depending on direction of store traffic flow).
Layout by Perceived Premiumness
Assumes that Craft beers are perceived to be more premium than Importeds due to their specialised nature. If this layout were by origin then the Craft and Imported doors would be swapped around.
There may be some conjecture around whether Low Carbs are perceived to be more premium than Domestic Premiums, but if your goal were to increase your sales of Low Carbs you’d run with it in Door 4 rather than Door 3.
Ultimately in determining your beer fridge layout you need to figure out which products you want shoppers to trade up to, and then layout out those products/segments in the middle and to the right in the planogram.
