CHICAGO -- Food Marketing Institute senior vice president Michael Sansolo kicked off the opening supersession of the 2006 FMI Show, The Changing Face of the Food IndustrySpeaks 2006 & Beyond, with what could be described as The FMI Diet."
The supermarket show's official theme this year was Fit for business. In introducing that theme, Sansolo offered some philosophy that can be applied to any retail channel, including the convenience store channel. He said, You have to be more fit today that you probably have ever been, because the level of competition, the contradictory nature of some [image-nocss] of the trendsand as we look at the issues that are shaping consumers today, we see again and again people saying one thing and doing three other things.
He said that to prepare for this speech, he went to a bookstore and looked at the fitness and diet section, where he estimated that he saw about 5,000 books about how to be more fit and lose weight at the same time. But I noticed there were two things that run through all of these books, he said. To lose weight, you have to find a way to eat a little less and exercise a little bit more."
He continued, There are really only two keys to successsell more products or find ways to reduce cost. Obviously, it's not that easy. If it was easy in dieting, everyone would be thin, everybody would be buff. And if it was easy in this industry, you wouldn't have to come to meeting after meeting, because you'd have the answer, and you'd be winning day after day. But the sad reality is, you can't rest on what you did before. You've got to find a way to be better tomorrow than you are today, because the competition demands it.
Returning to the diet analogy, Sansolo said, The only reason diet books are always on the bestseller list is because the diet book everybody bought last didn't work, so you have to buy a new one.
Sansolo also spoke of what he called the death of the middle. He said, Statistically, there always has to be a middle. There are big stores, there are medium stores and there are small stores. But the middle is a state of mind. The middle is ordinary, average. You could be a great upscale operator, you could be a great mainstream operator, you could be a great downscale operatorit doesn't make a difference so long as you're great, so long as you give your shoppers a reason every day to come to your stores.
So grocery retailers are using a variety of competitive tactics, from emphasizing perishables, using private label, using price differentiation, embracing niche formats and more, to stand out. FMI asked its members to fill out a report card, grading how effective they are in using these tactics. The respondents, according to Sansolo, said they were doing it allwe're low price, we're service, we're everything. So it probably comes as no surprise that the grades were not spectacular. Because when you are trying to be everything to all people, it's hard to be anything special to one individual. We get mediocrity as the result.
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