ROSEMONT, Ill. -- Confectioners need to work with retailers in all channels to create shopping interruption points throughout the store to improve candy sales and grow the category, according to Dechert-Hampe & Co., which recently presented Expanding the Dimensions of Confectionery: A $10 Billion Opportunity on behalf of the National Confectioner's Association (NCA) in Chicago.
That idea was among several strategies suggested by the marketplace management consulting firm in a presentation packed with both data and practical ideas, including placing [image-nocss] candy at key, high-traffic points to interrupt the typical shopping experience with atypical product placement.
Such interruption points include the cold vault, the freezer and the foodservice area, among others. The research pointed out that the majority of shopping trips today are convenience-based; shopping is focused on the perimeter of the store, so new merchandising vehicles enable more perimeter display; and impulse buying is driven by more points of interruption in a shopping trip.
The association is encouraging its supplier members to customize the research findings and strategies and present them to retailers to present a unified confectionery industry frontso that they are all preaching from the same hymnal, Dechert-Hampe's Suzanne Conrad said.
To compile the data and come up with the strategies, NCA enlisted major national retailers from the grocery, drug, mass merchandise, dollar and convenience channels, representing more than 20,000 stores. It conducted individual interviews with retailers, manufacturers and brokers, audits of more than 1,000 stores, in-store interviews with more than 900 candy buyers, interviews with candy consumers, analysis of store sales data and plan-o-grams and analysis of IRI syndicated data and secondary data.
Occasion-based marketing was another major strategy Dechert-Hampe offered to the approximately 50 confectionery industry executives in attendance at the Chicago stop of the NCA road show. The group held research workshops and membership briefings in New York, Chicago, Los Angeles and San Francisco.
Theater boxes of candy are an example of such an occasion-based packaging innovation. Consumers have gotten used to and prefer purchasing larger boxes of candy when going to the movies, and this trend has migrated back into the homeespecially with the advent of home theatersand to other nontheater settings.
This occasion-oriented strategy also includes creating demand by leveraging packaging for not only seasonal and big holidaysChristmas, Easter, Halloweenbut also secondary holidays such as Mother's Day, Grandparents' Day and Sweetest Day, and developing new consumer buying occasions, such as the Super Bowl and Back to School.
Other strategies included:
Driving shoppers to the section with better location, signage and merchandising. Increasing shelf space and assortment. Reinventing the section with better shelf organization and a more appealing product presentation. Embracing product innovation to meet new consumer needs. Harnessing the total power of snacking to expand the role and sales of confectionery.The two-year research project was conducted by Mission Viejo, Calif.-based Dechert-Hampe under the auspices of the NCA Trade Relations Committee, which established a Research Advisory Group from among the membership to provide direction to the project and review findings of the research. This group included representatives from Acosta Sales & Marketing Co., Cadbury Adams, Ferrara Pan Candy Co., Hershey Foods Corp., Just Born Inc., Liberty Orchards, Masterfoods USA (Mars Inc.) and Wm. Wrigley Jr. Co.
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