More brands on Aldi’s shelves?

How about Nestlé, P&G and Unilever for starters?

Given the rate of growth of the discounters, primarily at the expense of brands, it was inevitable that major suppliers would begin to find ways of working with Aldi and Lidl in order to compensate for the sluggish growth of traditional retailers...

In fact, a new report by Miloš Ryba at the IGD, gives details of branded manufacturers such as Nestlé, P&G and Unilevers' increasing willingness to list their products on discounters’ shelves in Aldi Germany over the past 12 months.

Nestlé currently offers Nesquik, Smarties and Wagner-Pizza, while P&G lists Blend-a-med, Lenor, Pampers, Ariel, Always and most recently Head & Shoulders in Aldi...

Just last week, Unilever, joined them with listings of Knorr, Langnese-Magnum and Duschdas...

More details in Miloš' article, but the key message for all branded suppliers has to be the need to reassess trade and channel strategies in order to define a non-compromising role for their brands in outlets that will otherwise continue to grow at the expense of brands...

And if the big guys are managing the transition, it must be possible for others...

Morrisons second quarter of sales growth, a baseline for NAMs?

Today’s news of steady progression establishes a minimum standard for Morrisons’ NAMs in making their financial case for a fair share deal for both parties.

In other words, unless your brand has grown by at least 0.7%, you won’t justify an interview.

However, the more your growth exceeds Morrisons average, the greater your appeal…

The key build on this position is to measure and compare Morrisons main financial ratios with your conservative estimate of your brand’s performance to show point-for-point how you are adding to the retailer’s comeback performance…

In other words, until Morrisons reveal more detail, work with the latest annual report and calculate their Net Margin, rotation, credit period, sales/sq ft and rate of growth, and then compare with your best estimate of your brand’s performance within the retailer.

For instance, you are already growing faster, like-or-like, so you have the buyer’s attention...

Next assess bottom line impact, your real contributor...

Typically, most mults, operate on an average 25% gross margin, will receive up to 20% of purchases in Trade Investment, average 43 days credit, turn their stock 25.6 times/annum and sell approx £900/sq. ft./annum.

Net Margin
Say Morrisons Gross Margin on your brand is 30%, with typical shrinkage (2%) and Store costs & Handling (15%), Overheads of 5%, you are contributing 8% to their bottom line…minimum.

If their GM on your brand is less than 25%, tip in your trade investment…

Trade credit
If you are giving more than 43 days credit, you are adding the additional cost savings to their bottom line.

Stockturn
If you are delivering your main SKU on a weekly basis, this looks like a stockturn of 50 times a year.

Sales/sq. ft./annum
Calculate your brands foot-print performance in Morrisons (number of facings x back-of-facings stock x SKU footprint x number of stores stocked) to give your selling area, and divide it into your annual sales to Morrisons to provide your sales/sq. ft., vs Morrisons average…

The above calculations will give you a conservative estimate of your positive impact on Morrisons performance…and hopefully a basis for indepth discussion on leveraging your brand's performance and optimising your trade investment in the aisle...

Where are Aldi & Lidl headed, profitwise?

Thinking back to the relative simplicity of the 800 SKU model, based primarily on surrogate label with a handful of anchor brands, coupled with low staffing levels and small outlets, it was relatively easy to beat the multiples on price and yet make adequate profits.

At that time, it was cost-effective to approach the multiples’ suppliers of private label, and piggy-back on key lines, without picking up origination and compliance costs.

However, now that the discounters are extending their ranges via more creative product introductions, it follows that they will need more expertise in terms of more support staff in R&D, Tech, QC, apart from picking up the burden of the usual ‘9 out of 10’ failure rate…

Furthermore, as they continue to grow share, consumer media will highlight any product defects, thus triggering the ‘tell a friend’ mechanism – 'if I like it, I tell one friend, disappoint me and I tell 10 friends…'

All adding further to the compliance overhead.

Given the fact that the mults continue to keep pressure on shelf prices, it follows that the discounters’ additional costs will dilute bottom line performance. Perhaps this will become an opportunity for an entrepreneur to re-discover the original 'hard discount' formula, and launch a competitor to Aldi & Lidl?

Leaving us all to ponder on where the legal responsibility for damage to consumers can be laid: retailer or O/L manufacturer?

Welcome to the high-cost world of ‘normal’ retail…

A wonky-chicken solution to excess drumstick demand?

Online clothing service for those that hate 'going shopping'...

Business Insider details a new online service that appears to eliminate one of the bugbears of a busy single-tasking (i.e. male) NAM's life - going shopping...

The Chapar, founded in 2012, is an online clothing-concierge service that offers its members "trunks" of curated items - including shirts, shoes, and knitwear - tailored to their taste and delivered next-day direct to their door.

Based on a combination of a short questionnaire, and phone consultation, a personal stylist sends a trunk of 12 items, of which 8 are usually returned...

For those who cannot wait, more details available on the Business Insider site...

A new way of shopping, but the issue for branded suppliers/retailers is how to factor a 66% return rate into an online business model...

Digital private label - your new competitor from Amazon

How its best-selling brands are driving AmazonBasics...

Bloomberg reports that the e-tailer is gleaning insights from it’s Amazonian product portfolio to produce own label equivalents of its best-sellers at up to 50% off.

It's AmazonBasics private label offering now includes more than 3,000 products based on their best-selling branded lines - from women’s blouses and men’s khakis to fire pits and camera tripods, all perfectly tailored to consumer demand.

Shoppers increasingly start on Amazon.com to search for products, bypassing Google and traditional chains’ websites.

So not only can Amazon track what shoppers are buying; it can also tell what merchandise they’re searching for but can’t find, allowing them to spec ideal products for their AmazonBasics offering.

The important issues for FMCG NAMs have to be how soon their turn will come, and what to do about it.

• Amazon are obviously working down a ‘best-selling’ league table, cherry-picking based on a combination of their sales and consumer searches
• They also have the luxury of trying single products, and discontinuing where necessary
• Suppliers would be unwise to miss any selling opportunities by refusing to supply Amazon
• Key for brand owners is to make their entire offering, access and fulfilment so attractive that they optimise direct purchase, without losing any potential via the Amazon route
• The difficult part has to be optimising your own data to bond with your consumer-shopper base, using Amazon as a standard…   

BHS - A Pound Shop Fails when the numbers don't add up...

Following its sale last year by Philip Green for £1, BHS – with debts of more than £1.3bn, including a pension fund deficit of £571m – had limited options… Rents on top 77 stores unchanged, rents reduced to 'market levels' on next 47 stores and 10 months trial for the 40 least profitable outlets, all to no avail....
A detailed timeline is available on the BBC site 

The key issue for NAMs is the extent of knock-on impact on other retailers that are battling under similar pressures...

In other words, time to check out the latest financials of your customer, and anticipate the inevitable, while your competitors dismiss the BHS issue as ‘another trade sector, nothing to do with us…’

Taking NOTHING for granted, when every sale counts...

The supermarket war heats up the multiples' approach to media, too

Whilst the multiples’ reductions in media spend could mean everything is going into price, in practice significant monies are still being invested in driving us to our favourite store…

Essentially, Media Week reports that during the recession of 2008-2009, traditional grocers were among the best advertisers as consumers continued to buy food while cutting back elsewhere. But that has changed in that Asda, Tesco and Morrisons have collectively cut spend on press, TV, outdoor, radio and cinema by nearly £100m, or about a third, since 2011, according to Nielsen – although some of that has gone into online.

Meanwhile, Sainsbury’s doing better financially, increased its spend by 2% to £59m (More details in the Media Week article)

All of this highlights the fact that the mults are competing with one another on price for a diminishing share of the action, and need to do so via differentiation - own label - and increasingly instore via the shopping experience.

This has to represent opportunities for suppliers that are capable of, and prepared to service regional and even store-based assortments, tailored to local need, and optimised via tailored shopper-marketing initiatives…

Finally, the main causes of it all, those ‘downmarket, common, limited-choice upstarts’ Aldi boosted ad expenditure by 160% to £69m from £26m and Lidl by 275% to £83m from £22m.

A message for your marketing colleagues?
Given that any growth is being driven by Multiples own label and Discounters’ surrogate brands, it is vital that your marketing colleagues increase brand alignment with retail offer-communication, while you find non-compromising ways into Aldi and Lidl…

KAMClinic Q22: Buyer wants to put us ‘on consignment’

Q22: Brian, a quickie: Buyer wants to put us ‘on consignment’ i.e. we invoice on sales out (Ian, St Albans 4th Feb 2016)

A:  Thanks Ian,
‘On consignment’ always seems like increased collaboration, but strictly speaking, unless you build in some conditions, it can end up diluting your account P&L.

As you know, most retailers have shrink levels of approx. 2%, meaning that for every 100 cases you deliver, 98 actually goes through the checkout. This means that by agreeing to invoice based on sales out, you are absorbing the shrinkage issue (and cost!).

If the buyer is acting in good faith, your condition that checkout sales be restored to 100% (volume sales out/98 x 100) for invoicing, should be accepted. If not, then not…

Hope this helps.
Brian

P.S. Despite your having to refuse ‘on consignment’ your buyer may be simply wanting more money.
Best to continue with ‘obviously we cannot agree to unconditional on consignment invoicing, but we may have other ways of increasing our trade investment, depending on getting equivalent value in return... Now what type of money are we talking about?’

Disclaimer: 

Your Query?

For a KAMClinic reply, simply email me ( bmoore@namnews.com ) giving as much detail you are comfortable with... 

Auto-storecheck: Supermarket robot creates product maps as it takes stock

Pic: 4D Retail Technology Corp via Gismag        

A great article in Gizmag tells of the development of the stock-taking, store-mapping 4D Space Genius robot by Toronto's 4D Retail Technology Corp.

In less than an hour, the self-guiding Segway-based Space Genius can reportedly move along every aisle of a 40,000 sq. ft. supermarket or other large store, scanning all of the products and barcodes on display in HD and 3D. In the process, it produces a 3D map of the store, showing SKUs, OOS, pricing & placement anomalies.

(The Gizmag article gives more detail, including links to a Tally Robot).

Apart from the obvious advantages for mults and consumer-shoppers, NAMs - via an app - can conduct indepth storechecks 'from the comfort of their own homes'..., but we all know that nothing beats mingling with the aisle-travellers, live...

Meanwhile, spare a thought for what the Space Genius could do for instore compliance...

Buy Now, Pay Less Later

An article in this week’s Sunday Times details an unusual price promotion in a German Furniture chain: Who’s Perfect, which could provide UK NAMs with a way of understanding some of the consequences of Negative Interest Rates.

Essentially, its Frankfurt store offers a white Halma corner sofa – the company’s bestseller – for €2,700, buying and paying now at full price, or have a 1% discount if paid after two years… 

This is because the store gets charged negative interest rates on its bank deposits, so it is preferable to leave the cash with customers for two years at a cost of 0.5% per annum…!

Logical to a point, but the promotion ignores the risk-factor involved with credit extension.

For example, can you imagine if, after all these years of begging, or even paying for earlier payment, you were to offer your buyer a discount for taking even longer to pay, at increasing risk to you, in these Imperfect times…?

Tailoring your brand portfolio to new retail realities...

As the multiples struggle to adjust to the consumer's shift to smaller, cheaper, faster, closer, more convenient and online shopping by selling surplus outlets and trying to manage lower productivity caused by redundant space in their estates by culling SKUs, the consequences for brands are hopefully obvious.

In other words, with less shelf space available, only strong brands can maintain their facings, unless you can prove otherwise....

Moreover, brands are further threatened by the fact that much of the multiples' growth is via private label (if in any doubt, why not dig into your in-house Kantar data?), and discounters' via surrogate labels.., all adding to the need for new retail strategies..

In the face of these 'permanent' market changes, it follows that branded suppliers need to re-set what may be a pre-2008 approach by re-evaluating the relative appeal of their brand portfolios to suit current retail realities.

Essentially, this means fundamentally re-assessing consumer appeal, by brand, by retailer, vs. available competition to ensure each SKU of each brand has a defensible rationale to justify its on-shelf presence in each of the multiples.

In practice, this will mean you will have a different brand portfolio for each of the multiples, with possible regional variations to match local need.

Finally, any of your brands that do not meet these criteria should be diverted to other channels, before the multiples do it on your behalf...  

Making every trip count...

Demonstrating your impact on Tesco averages

How your brand drives Tesco performance in latest figures

Latest results indicate that:

1. Tesco Group sales £54.4bn vs. Inventories of £2.4bn suggest a stockturn of 22.6 times/annum

Given your twice weekly delivery, and assuming smooth sell-through, has to suggest your SKUs are turning 100 times /annum, thereby driving Tesco stockturn...!

2. Tesco UK sales of £37.2bn vs. UK sales area of 41.5m sq. ft. showing selling intensity of £900/sq. ft./annum 

Calculating your SKU footprint (Average number of facings x number of units of facings backup on shelf x numbers of stores stocking) and then dividing the result into Tesco sales of your SKU per annum, has to show that your SKU is generating sales per sq ft of at least 2x Tesco average...

Just two ways of demonstrating your value in negotiation...