Whole Foods Masters Social Media With..."User Generated Content"
What Is User Generated Content & What Do Retailers Need To Know About It?
U.G.C...Today's reference term to the all important User Generated Content. User Generated Content is the fastest building core of what social media is all about. How more information is distributed than ever before.
Whole Foods and "Brands" like Chobani contribute, encourage and foster a social media environment where there respective "Brands" are highlighted and their abilities almost exaggerated to build retail food sales. How do they do this?
Touching the customer digitally...feeding and sometimes overfeeding the social media channels. This is what has led these companies to "Brand" level recognition directly attributed to social media
A great example is how Chobani grew a new dairy category "Greek Yogurt" by promoting to the point of exploitation yogurt recipes across all of its distribution channels as well as all of the available social media channels.
According to BuzzFeed's companies like Tasty have more than 94 million Facebook followers. This becomes the definition of User Generated Content. So we as retailers must contribute to and better understand content will ultimately prime the retail food sales building pump.
Lets look deeper into the Whole Foods...User Generated Content pipeline. Whole Foods is said to feature more recipes than promotions on its website homepage. Understanding this fact points to users coming to the web for information and not just price.
Whole Foods has a dedicated newsletter and constantly promotes recipes on Twitter and Instagram. Then there is the WholeFoods Facebook chatbot in which customers can check out products or search recipes searching keywords..which are "Content", again not price.
As Supermarket Retailers We Must Escape From The "Digital Denial"
Supermarkets across all demographics will tell you "Flat sales are the new good"...seriously, when we accept as purveyors of an analog dialog (print) that flat is the new OK we have embraced "Digital Denial"
The primary use of print for supermarket retailers to build sales is in essence relying on an old friend we like but fully recognize can no longer deliver for us.
The sales growth opportunity results with User Generated Content as digital coupled with social media is before us like never before.
A Recent Nielson Study Found....Over 80% of Millennials want to know more about how their food is not only produced but prepared....73% of Millennials are willing to pay more for the "Brands" they trust.
Now we better understand User Generated Content and the resulting information and digital transformation translates into retail sales growth. We could live with the past, send out only the printed ad and with that forget User Generated Content.
Stop for a moment and think about the "Vendor Program" opportunities. Branded items looking to expand their reach digitally. While any "Brand" can easily go digital themselves the retailer allows the "Brand" the availability to now purchase the items.
A few years from now we will all chuckle about sending ads to press 10-14 days in advance of any sale.
Imagine hoping we picked the right sales items and prices. We believe we could wait for that knowledge by receiving the competitions printed ad and reach out to the customer with all of the latest information and pricing only hours before a potential sale easily targeting the competitions featured sale items.
In 2019, We Must Become The Retailers We Have The Ability To Become.
Content & real time information will drive retail sales growth. Given the opportunity to drive content together we will soon understand its as much about User Generated Content as it is about the price of bananas.
Forgetting or avoiding digital content and its information driven environment is in fact forgetting and avoiding the consumer as well as our ability to sell.
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Many have asked why I choose to write about what I see in the supermarket industry today and my ideas. At Bad-Adz Digital, PreparedFoodPhotos.com & Adlife we believe great ideas and the resulting branding will give new life and direction to any company. So for that reason we chose to open the discussion.
Yes, I understand I probably misspelled something or butchered the English language in a few places, the goal however was to open your minds to new ideas.
Joel Albrizio Bad-Adz Digital Bad-AdzVideos.com PreparedFoodPhotos.com Adlife
