Introduction
In the fiercely competitive beverage industry, standing out on the shelf involves more than just striking designs and impactful displays. Today's consumers seek authenticity and trustworthiness in the brands they select. This is where genuine customer reviews become crucial, significantly swaying purchasing decisions.
Recognising this trend, Heineken launched an innovative campaign for Inch’s Cider, utilising CheckoutSmart’s SmartReputation program to tap into the power of genuine customer feedback. This case study delves into how CheckoutSmart assisted Heineken in transforming ordinary customer reviews into a compelling shopper marketing program, enhancing the brand's reputation and influencing buyer behaviour across Tesco and Sainsbury's.
Images from Heineken materials
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Topics:
Grocery,
marketing,
Rating and Reviews,
NPD,
Shopper Marketing
When a product’s rating falls below the critical 4.0 mark, it is easy to panic or bury your head in the sand. After all, consumers rely heavily on reviews to guide their choices, and a poor score can signal trouble ahead for your products. Yet, rather than viewing these ratings as a dead-end, they can represent a valuable opportunity for growth and improvement.
At CheckoutSmart, we see these poor reviews not as a problem but as a unique opportunity to transform your product with SmartReformulation.
The Hidden Opportunity in Poor Reviews
Our analysis reveals that the bottom 20% of products with at least 30 reviews in UK supermarkets since 2023 have an average rating of less than 4.0. This figure underscores a vital truth: these products don’t need more reviews—they need reformulating to succeed.
Instead of trying to drown out the negativity with more reviews (which is rightly banned under recent legislation), it’s time to listen to your customers. Using the right tools, these less-than-ideal reviews can become a goldmine of insights that guide product improvement, revitalise your brand, and boost your sales.
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Topics:
Grocery,
marketing,
NPD,
Shopper Marketing,
Shopper Insights,
Insights
Consumer-facing brands should leverage bespoke consumer feedback data to train or fine-tune AI / ML models to get ahead. These expert models can help them gain valuable insights into consumer preferences, behaviours, and sentiments, enabling them to optimise product descriptions, packaging design and advertising copy.
One application we have developed for such AI models is to assess and classify product reviews with helpful tags. Using consumer feedback as the basis, we have created proprietary measures of product reviews, such as how influential an individual review is and how strongly it reviews the product's taste or effectiveness.
By analysing these new measures, brand owners can identify their performance and patterns in consumer reviews, generate new insights, compare themselves to competition and even highlight individual reviews for a specific purpose, such as "suitable for advertising".
Using bespoke shopper data to train AI models represents a significant opportunity for consumer-facing brands to enhance their understanding of consumers and markets.
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Topics:
marketing,
Shopper Marketing,
Insights,
AI,
Data Analytics
It's obvious when you think about it, that for online grocery shoppers selecting products to put in their basket, product Rating out of 5 is always more important than the number of Reviews, right?
Well, wrong actually and not just wrong occasionally, wrong most of the time. From our research of 3,710 online supermarket shoppers we know that when the average Ratings for two similar products are different by as much as 0.3 eg 4.2 vs 4.5, then the number of Reviews is much more important in product choice. Let me give you an example:
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Topics:
Supermarket,
FMCG,
Rating and Reviews,
Shopper Marketing,
ecommerce,
CPG,
Shopper Insights,
Shopper Marketing Agency
Launching new products in the New Year can be quite an adventure, it's no secret that the road to success for any NPD is filled with many bumps and mostly arrives at a dead end. As reported by Harvard Business Review, a staggering 90% of new products face failure within their first year, despite the substantial investments by FMCG manufacturers in R&D, marketing, and advertising.
To help your new products have the best possible start in the New Year, we'll explain the crucial role of consumer reviews. Here are four compelling reasons why securing a good number of consumer reviews as early as possible is essential for the success of your new offerings.
PS For even more on why reviews are critical for NPD, see our post 10 Reasons why Shopper Reviews are vital for Successful New Products.
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Topics:
Supermarket,
Grocery,
FMCG,
NPD,
Shopper Marketing
Join Andrew Pearl VP Strategy and Insight EMEA at eCommerce performance analytics company Profitero and Paul Lees our Group Managing Director at CheckoutSmart, as they discuss fascinating original research on grocery ratings and reviews.
This study was specifically undertaken in the UK amongst over 3,700 online grocery shoppers to support the understanding of FMCG leaders and eCommerce teams, by answering their questions:
- Do online grocery shoppers really bother reading online supermarket reviews?
- Do they read reviews in our category/sub-category?
- What elements are more or less important in a product review?
- What makes a good online product review from a grocery shopper perspective
If you would like a copy of the full 22 page report with all 72 subcategories plus the "6 Golden rules of ratings & reviews" go here:
Alternatively if you would like me to talk you through the results and the actions any brand should take as a result then I would be more than happy to do so. Simply use the Contact us form and I or one of the team will come back to you.
We can help you increase genuine ratings and reviews across all the major grocery retailers (including ASDA, Tesco, Morrisons, Sainsburys, Waitrose and Ocado in the UK) but Also Boots, Superdrug, Iceland and Holland & Barrett. In fact anywhere you find ratings and reviews posted onto online sites by shoppers, we should be able to help you. Whether that it in the UK, Spain, Canada or the US.
We can work with all sizes of organisation, from ones with a few SKUs to ones with hundreds, each one gets our full attention and guaranteed delivery of at last 30 unique and genuine reviews in each reailer.
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Topics:
Grocery,
FMCG,
Rating and Reviews,
Shopper Marketing,
ecommerce,
profitero
Are you preparing to launch new products? Harvard Business Review reports that 90% of new products fail within the first year, despite significant investments in research, development, marketing, and advertising.
To improve your chances of success, it's important to obtain consumer reviews as soon as possible. Here are ten reasons why consumer reviews are crucial for all new grocery products:
Reasons why shopper reviews are critical to new products are:
- Answering for shoppers: "Will I like it?"
- For instant shopper credibility
- You look like a bestseller
- Shopper read reviews for products they don't know
- The in-store opportunity
- Reap long term benefits
- Increasing popularity of reviews with shoppers
- Your competitors are growing reviews
- Actionable insights
- Avoid early delists
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Topics:
Supermarket,
Grocery,
FMCG,
NPD,
Shopper Marketing
Update: Since this post was created, it would appear that ChatGPT has made it impossible to analyse reviews from a URL. You can still copy and paste reviews for it to summarise.
I am sure just about everyone has heard of ChatGPT. Many have also given it a quickly go and been amazed with what it can do. Having said that, exactly how practical is it for work purposes?
If you do know ChatGPT, please go to the bottom of this article to get the AI created introduction:
Well, if you're an e-commerce manager, shopping marketing manager, or brand manager, there's a practical application of ChatGPT that you can use today to get fresh insights into customer reviews of your products on Amazon. By using ChatGPT to summarize the reviews, you can quickly and easily gain valuable insights that can help you make informed decisions about your products and marketing strategies.
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Topics:
Rating and Reviews,
Shopper Marketing,
Amazon
As a leading digital shopper marketing agency, we are always looking to extend our understanding of the ever-changing grocery shopping environment. Recently we undertook a survey of regular grocery shoppers to understand how they shop on Tesco online and what they think about their experience.
The feedback tells us that there is opportunity for Tesco.com to grow faster but also some significant threats in the wings. Everything we asked has been collated into a comprehensive 20-page report which is available to download. We have pulled the highlights together into a summary SWOT analysis below, together with a few examples of the charts in the download.
If you would like the full report it is available to download here.
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Topics:
Supermarket,
Grocery,
FMCG,
Shopper Marketing,
Tesco,
Tesco.com,
ecommerce,
Shopper Research
We surveyed members of CheckoutSmart to understand their experiences of shopping during Covid-19 and their views on how their behaviour will change when things "more or less return to normal". In total 4,324 members responded, over 3,100 of whom are also online grocery shoppers.
The survey focused on how their grocery shopping experience had changed pre and during Covid-19 restrictions and their personal expectations on how their behaviour will change going forward. This blog article contains a summary of the most relevant results. More detail on specific topics may be available, please contact us to hear more.
The most significant finding is that online shopping could still grow even faster post Covid if retailers can address the two major concerns shoppers have of slot availability (which is surely just a matter of time) and the cost of delivery which must surely come down with scale and the the recent move by Amazon.
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Topics:
Supermarket,
Grocery,
NPD,
Shopper Marketing,
ecommerce,
Coronavirus,
Shopper Insights,
Shopper Research