Experience Manifesto: Kroger Advances In-Store Network

I hope that it's okay to cross-post from our blog here, but this is both a hot topic for the retail industry and it's one of my soap boxes.  To me, it's a core issue that speaks to creating a retail environment that's for the consumer or creating an environment that's about the retailer.  While they don't need to be mutually exclusive, in many cases choices have been made that make them so.  My rant on our blog is much longer, so feel free to click on the link below if you want to read the full piece.

So, another article about another in-store network and here's what the teaser had to say:

P-O-P Times sat down with Evan Anthony, Kroger's corporate vice president of marketing and advertising, to discuss rollout plans for an ambitious, integrated network that will turn the nation's largest supermarket chain into a "media company."  (Emphasis mine)

So, let me tell you how I feel about this.  Kroger--you're a grocery store, not a media company.  You sell groceries.  That's what you do and how you make your money.  Groceries.  Not media, not real estate, not movie rentals or DTC pharmaceuticals.  You don't seel bonds or insurance policies.  You sell groceries. You can use these things to generate additional revenue, but you're never going to become a media company.  And, if you need to sell media in order to make money due to declining grocery sales, then you need to get out of the grocery business!

And this is always one of my really hot button issues.  There's nothing that gets my goat more than people talking about advertising that you can't turn off.

"There's too much ad-avoidance now; you can't get an audience, a true audience, delivered now the way you could years ago," says Lon Von Hurwitz, president, sales and marketing of IBN. He explains that the network will be sold in a fashion similar to the cost-per-thousand basis for broadcast media, rather than along the ROI measures common to P-O-P. "When an audience is inside a store, they can't avoid us, they can't turn us off."

So, let's once again be clear about this. Advertising based on the fact that you can't turn it off is not a good advertising medium. That’s what got the industry into the situation we’re in now and why no one likes us. They don’t like us continually forcing our advertising on them.

Link: Experience Manifesto: Kroger Advances In-Store Network.

--David Polinchock