Redesigning Target's snack aisle for dual-level retail appeal

Grocery Aisle

What's there Now:

The snacks section of the grocery aisle at the Target features the following products:

Werther's Original

Reese's Peanut Butter Cups

Haribo

Sour Patch

LifeSavers

Altoids

Mentos

Twizzlers

Liquorice

A rack of candy bars

Gun, more lifesavers

Ghirardelli chocolate

This section does not have a lot of compelling merchandise -- the brands are well-known but these are not the biggest sellers in the store. In this section, there are some minor groupings -- gum, candy bars, licorice and chocolate. The redesign can either focus on these groupings or individual products. The target market consists of parents with children, so the redesign will take that target market in mind.

The Target aisle that I am working with needs to be evaluated on the principles of store design. Underhill (2009) notes that major brands should be at eye level. Those are the products that attract buyers over to a particular shelf. This is something that Target is going well with its shelves here. The generic products and lesser brands are almost exclusively relegated to the lower levels. However, one has to consider the audience. Eye level for an adult is different from eye level for a child. So while the big brands at adult eye level make sense, attention also needs to be paid to what is at the child's eye level (Keller, 2013). Right now, that is actually a lot of the same products. However, this approach makes little intuitive sense.

For example, the Werther's Original occupies four rows of product, taking it from child level to adult level. The problem is that Werther's is marketed to adults. It does not need to be at child eye level. The opposite is true of Sour Patch, which also receives several rows on the shelf, ranging from the lowest level upwards. This approach hints at the principles of eye level, but the top height is probably too high to attract the target market for this product. Furthermore, by using all that space for Sour Patch, there is almost no room (one row) for the Haribo. The treatment of Haribo in this display is strange because it is at adult eye level but the product only receives one row, which is not much as far as making an impression on the eye.

There are some sections where the eye level principle is upheld. For example where the LifeSavers are located below the gum, there is children's gum (the bright pink containers) at the lowest level. The adult does not need to see this anyway, but the child will. With this section, the strange factor is the placement of the LifeSavers. They are a substitute product for gum, but it seems almost strange to segregate mints at the lower level and gum at the higher level. The results is that Altoids and Mentos are at the eye level of a toddler. You can argue Mentos, but Altoids is not a toddler product.

Lastly, the licorice section receives interesting treatment. A higher-end brand receives prime placement at adult eye level (good) while the children's product, Twizzlers is lower (good) but a very good placement on the shelf is reserved for the store brand. While store brands can be ok for margins, they do not attract customers to the shelf, so the lack of a high-visibility product on this shelf makes it more likely to be ignored. Arguably the strongest brand of licorice is the Twizzlers, so they should be higher -- they can also stay lower to attract kids but they are the instantly-recognizable product on that shelf and should be placed in a better position to attract customers to that category. This follows on the principle of the sales magnet (Ohta & Higuchi, 2013).

Redesign

We shall start with the sale magnet. The section is called "Movie and Snacking Candy," whatever that means. I want a new name for this -- what if I don't want to watch a movie? Why hint to the customer that if you aren't watching a movie you don't need to be in this aisle? We'll call it Snacking Candy until a better name is found. The current sales magnet is Werther's Original -- not good enough. It's a well-known brand but we want to attract kids and quite frankly the Werther's packaging does not pop for children. Our magnet is going to be the chocolate. Mom wants the chocolate, and when she brings the children over they will find things placed at their eye level. That's serendipitous shopping (No author, 2013). She cannot buy herself a nice 80% dark and tell her child 'no'. So the chocolate is the magnet.

The second thing we want to do is to get all the kids' stuff at kids' level. So the Sour Patch is moved down, and we'll lose the lower row of Werther's replacing it with the Nerds or whatever those are beneath it. The extra row from the Sour Patch will go to the Haribo to give it a little bit more presence. I'd want to check the sales on that, though, because I don't know if Haribo is worthy of the best spot on that rack. The Altoids need to be moved up from the bottom and to the higher levels, perhaps trading places (with some addition shuffling) with the generic licorice. So move that generic licorice down. The stuff that is at the bottom of the licorice rack is not licorice, so send it over the newly-vacated Altoids rack. The Altoids now has a space to use, maybe not adjacent to the gum but something can be worked out there. Either way, the generic licorice goes lower and the Altoids go higher.

Shuffling some racks around is nice, but there is a bigger issue. This stretch of aisle is disorganized. The candy bar rack sits in the middle, such that there is no flow. The consumer's eye will stop at the edge of that rack. To look from one side to the other is unlikely. We do not want to break the concentration of the consumer, we want to entice them with even more candy. The physical presence of that candy bar rack is simply imposing -- the Werther's actually live in its shadow quite literally. The candy bars need to be isolate to one side, preferably the front so that they are more visible, and so that they can draw eyeballs rather than breaking up the visual flow of the aisle. By creating more visual flow, we give customers more reason to scan the entire aisle and less reason to look at a single item and then walk away.