EDMONTON — The trend in Canadian retail will see stores grow larger and become part of global brands, Jeff Doucette told a pulse food development competition.
Walmart is still the largest retailer in the world with $447 billion US in sales each year, but the top 10 retailers all have sales in the billions of dollars, said the market researcher with Field Agent Canada.
Canadians tend to look south to the United States for trends, but Doucette, who flies more than 150,000 kilometres a year, looks at trends around the world.
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He said Canadians can expect more American retailers, such as Target, to open stores in Canada.
“Canada is pretty attractive to American retailers because we think a lot alike,” he said.
Target won’t be a player in the food industry, but American Whole Foods Markets may grow in Canada. The stores promote farmers and local products, but producers need to be wary. Whole Foods and other food companies have their own “animal wellness ratings” that their suppliers must follow.
“We will see more competition coming here and competition will go up.”
Doucette sees retailers building great brands. Gone are the days when private label brands were yellow with black lettering that customers hid in the back of their pantries at home. Retailers are developing brands that are better and cheaper than national brands.
Stores will establish smaller stores at bus depots and subway stations to provide customer convenience.
The savvy retailer will spend thousands of dollars to understand the individual shopper. Companies previously gathered a lot of data through loyalty cards in the past, but they didn’t use it. Retailers now use the information to build profiles of shoppers, which allows them to send the right promotions to the right people.
Targeted marketing has become so successful for Britain’s Tesco’s chain, that coupon redemption has jumped from two percent to 20 to 40 percent on certain items.
“You can imagine what your grocery basket says about you,” said Doucette.
Data that retailers gather allows them to know more about shoppers than the shoppers themselves, he said.
“You go from a shadowy figure to knowing where you live, where you like to shop, how you get to work and your favourite brands.”
Large retailers are switching from television and newspaper advertising to sending information straight to the customer on their smartphones based on their shopping profile.
The retailer of the future will be more conscious of its ecological footprint. During the past five years sustainability has inched to the top of the list of things that retailers believe is important.
While the object is to reduce the ecological foot print, it also has the secondary benefit of increasing the company’s bottom line.
Doucette said Walmart wrote a letter to its laundry soap suppliers announcing it would buy only ultra concentrated laundry detergent to help save the environment. There was no discussion about a decision that changed the entire laundry industry.
Doucette said it saves 100 million gallons of water a year, 95 million pounds of plastic resin and 125 million lb. of cardboard packaging, as well as less diesel fuel in trucking the product to market.
“Yes it’s good for the environment, but it’s also good for the bottom line.”
Proctor and Gamble estimates re-moving the cardboard roll from toilet paper will save 90 million cardboard rolls a year plus 360,000 pounds of plastic covering and 54,000 gallons of diesel in trucking.
Future retailers will also focus on smartphones.
“The mobile shopper is always on,” he said.
Smartphone users can check prices or buy their groceries by scanning quick response codes and sending their orders over the telephone.
Doucette said companies also need to develop websites designed for tablets and smartphones.
