You’re starting to get bored with the same old stuff that you get in your food box every week. There’s nothing new in there and since you’ve stopped shopping at your grocery store you’re no longer exposed to new branded products. It’s too much trouble to even change your order now because you wouldn’t know how to change it anyway. And so, you resign yourself to getting more of the same. You’ve sacrificed variety for convenience.

Sound a little far-fetched? It’s not as far away as you think. As more and more grocery stores promise speedy home delivery to save you the trip to the store, your choices are being reduced by the very technology that enables the ordering process. One of the ways this technology is dumbing down your shopping experience is with the assumption that you’ve already chosen the brands you like, and, unspoken but implied, that you will never change! This is especially true once you start reordering your “same as last time” purchases.

Sure, online grocery shopping will certainly attempt to account for this in a very profitable way. They will charge producers for pop-up ads that target the types of previous purchases you’ve made. They will also tell you what other products were purchased by people who have bought similar branded products. But in order to see these pop-ups you must be on their site every week. Not very likely.

What will happen in fact is that many people will not even go back to the site once they’ve set up their initial order. They will simply give the store permission to deliver the same order with the same brands as last time. But viewing the store visit as strictly an act of replenishment, collection, or delivery to replace your larder is forgetting something very important. Discovery! Not to mention, Entertainment!

When you go into a physical store you enjoy what some psychologists call “retail therapy.” The act of setting time aside, making yourself presentable, changing your scenery by physically going to a store, interacting with other people in real time, asking for and receiving suggestions, being exposed to a variety of choices in every category, and stumbling upon that new, impulse, notion buy, all add to revitalization and discovery.

Stumbling upon that new, impulse, notion buy doesn’t really happen online. So the last brand choices you made before you started getting your “regular reorders” are generally the ones you’re stuck with.

And what about new CPG brand producers? Their challenge of building a new CPG brand just got a whole lot tougher! With Walmart adding to the ever-growing list of retail grocery stores offering online delivery, impulse buys are going to become a thing of the past. The growth of online ordering with home delivery will inadvertently create repeat customers who want “more of the same!”

The brands that are already established will benefit greatly from this change because it’s too disconcerting to shop for new brands in the first place. There’s always the anxiety that the new brand you choose will not perform as expected. There’s always the worry that you will have to choose yet another new brand, and another and another until you find a satisfactory replacement. This is hard enough to do with the store visit. Imagine how hard it’s going to be without tactile comparison and displays of new brands that you stumble upon when in a physical store. May as well stick with the old brand even if it’s not performing…

Once again, we see technology that’s being sold to us as improving our efficiency really just dumbing us down to the point where we are willing to accept less choices. To save a little time, will we give up discovery? Will we let the improvement in our food brand choices end with the last trip we made to the grocery store right before we started re-ordering the “same as last time?” Sounds pretty boring, doesn’t it?

Who We Are

Michael Houlihan and Bonnie Harvey co-authored the New York Times bestselling business book, The Barefoot Spirit: How Hardship, Hustle, and Heart Built America’s #1 Wine Brand. The book has been selected as recommended reading in the CEO Library for CEO Forum, the C-Suite Book Club, and numerous university classes on business and entrepreneurship. It chronicles their humble beginnings from the laundry room of a rented Sonoma County farmhouse to the board room of E&J Gallo, who ultimately acquired their brand and engaged them as brand consultants. Barefoot is now the world’s largest wine brand.

Beginning with virtually no money and no wine industry experience, they employed innovative ideas to overcome obstacles, create new markets and forge strategic alliances. They pioneered Worthy Cause Marketing and performance-based compensation. They built an internationally bestselling brand and received their industry’s “Hot Brand” award for several consecutive years.

They offer their Guiding Principles for Success (GPS) to help entrepreneurs become successful. Their book, The Entrepreneurial Culture: 23 Ways To Engage and Empower Your People, helps corporations maximize the value of their human resources.

Currently they travel the world leading workshops, trainings, & keynoting at business schools, corporations, conferences. They are regular media guests and contributors to international publications and professional journals. They are C-Suite Network Advisors & Contributing Editors. Visit their popular brand building site at www.consumerbrandbuilders.com.

To make inquiries for keynote speaking, trainings or consulting, please contact sales@thebarefootspirit.com.

The post Are We Sacrificing Choices Just to Save a Little Time? appeared first on The Barefoot Spirit.

These products may incorporate technology or even be sold online, but their producers know that they will grow their brands faster, sell higher volumes in a single transaction, and have a better chance of being discovered in a retail store. Why? Several reasons:

1. Weight. Consumer products tend to weigh so much that the expense of home delivery cannot compete with customer pick up. Customers know this and regularly drive to retail stores to purchase many such items all at one time for sheer efficiency.

2. Visibility. When in a retail store, customers are more likely to discover and buy new products and notion items that they may miss seeing online. This makes retail stores a sought after location especially for new consumer brands and products.

3. Convenience. Customers plan on regular visits to retail stores to get products they need in their hands that day. Many visit more than one type of product store on the same trip.

4. Volume. Consumer product producers can sell large quantities of their products in one transaction to a chain or box store and get regional and national distribution within that retail company. They get one check from one entity for a large shipment.

All this seems obvious, but today we have gotten so carried away with online sales and everything tech that we may have forgotten that the three basic human needs are still food, clothing, and shelter. Although you can purchase many of these products online, ultimately you want the convenience of a retail store for these necessities.

With tech we hear, “I don’t really need it, but I can’t live without it!” and that’s fine. Technology has become a part of our lives, but cannot replace our basic needs. Technology offers producers of consumer products a convenient way for their customers to research their products. Tech has given these producers more accurate, efficient, and time-saving applications to handle supply chain management, production, accounting, modeling, and social presence, but until you can actually get real products right through your computer, we are stuck with the most efficient way of getting them to our homes – retail outlets.

Still, the most important part of the retail sales process is the physical point of sale. It’s where your product, your customer, the money, and the decision to buy your product all come together. Consumer product producers know that’s generally in a physical, bricks-and-mortar retail store. They know that their new product will be in front of an already established audience qualified and capable of taking it home that day.

This is why it’s so important for us personally to serve this increasingly neglected entrepreneurial market segment with education about what it really takes to achieve success with a consumer product sold through a conventional distribution system.

Over the past year we have been working on a soon-to-be-released 4-part video webinar on this very challenge. In this webinar, we give to you the guiding principles for success we learned during our 30 years of experience creating and marketing a successful international consumer product sold through a three-level distribution system – which includes producer, distributer, and retailer.

The lessons we learned will certainly give you or someone you know a big head start and valuable insights on consumer product success in the bricks-and-mortar retail space. Check it out at www.thebarefootspiritgps.com

Who We Are

Michael Houlihan and Bonnie Harvey co-authored the New York Times bestselling business book, The Barefoot Spirit: How Hardship, Hustle, and Heart Built America’s #1 Wine Brand. The book has been selected as recommended reading in the CEO Library for CEO Forum, the C-Suite Book Club, and numerous university classes on business and entrepreneurship. It chronicles their humble beginnings from the laundry room of a rented Sonoma County farmhouse to the board room of E&J Gallo, who ultimately acquired their brand and engaged them as brand consultants. Barefoot is now the world’s largest wine brand.

Beginning with virtually no money and no wine industry experience, they employed innovative ideas to overcome obstacles, create new markets and forge strategic alliances. They pioneered Worthy Cause Marketing and performance-based compensation. They built an internationally bestselling brand and received their industry’s “Hot Brand” award for several consecutive years.

They offer their Guiding Principles for Success (GPS) to help entrepreneurs become successful. Their book, The Entrepreneurial Culture: 23 Ways To Engage and Empower Your People, helps corporations maximize the value of their human resources.

Currently they travel the world leading workshops, trainings, & keynoting at business schools, corporations, conferences. They are regular media guests and contributors to international publications and professional journals. They are C-Suite Network Advisors & Contributing Editors. Visit their popular brand building site at www.consumerbrandbuilders.com.

To make inquiries for keynote speaking, trainings or consulting, please contact sales@thebarefootspirit.com.

The post Aspiring Entrepreneurs of Consumer Products are Often Overshadowed by Technopreneurs appeared first on The Barefoot Spirit.