Does Less Mean More

There’s no ponytails or fine wines at Morrisons – just 100 wines for less than £3 and "something special" for the weekend. But does it work? Robyn Lewis reports

WITH THE TAG-LINE "The Best for Less" you shouldn’t be expecting rare organic fare and fine wine from Morrisons supermarket.  But this highly ambitious chain is typical of its northern roots and is proud to offer a more down to earth approach, primarily because that’s exactly what its customers want.

As a result, the chain’s wine department has banned the term "fine wine" as one that is too meaningless and intimidating.  "We don’t have what I call the ‘pony-tail’ aspect of a specialist retailer like Oddbins," says Morrisons’ licensed trades director, John Spurs.

"We pride ourselves on having staff in the wine and spirits department that know their stuff but we don’t have that height of knowledge or that ‘looking down your nose’ attitude either. I believe that a customer should be treated the same, irrespective of whether they are buying a bottle of Lambrusco or a £50 Bordeaux."

The Morrisons chain comprises 121 supermarkets, spread around the north and east of England mostly, though they are spreading slowly south and also into Wales. It has a 5.9% share in the UK grocery market and is Britain’s fastest growing supermarket.

The wine and spirit department has always been given a high profile within the chain and has up to 10% of the selling floor in each branch from which to trade its 500-strong range of wines.  "I don’t think we really specialise in any region or country," says Stuart Purdy, trading manager.

 "With the range we have developed we have tried to take notice of the price points the public buy at, to a large extent, and have tried to form a selection that meets their demands. I don’t want to be rude about any of the competitors but I find it alarming when you know that so much of the sales are under five quid, how little some supermarkets are offering at that level."

Or, as Spurs puts it in a way that rather exemplifies that down-to-earth approach, "We go for price – we are a supermarket."  The typical Morrisons shopper is not, one would imagine, a wine connoisseur and so the team takes care to ensure that things are kept as simple as possible.

The POS are clear, in large print, with just the basic information – country, tasting note and suggested food match – and wines are stocked by country, each clearly divided.  "Around 99% of wine consumers know nothing about wine," says Purdy.

 "My mother wouldn’t know Blue Nun from Chardonnay and I try to think of her as Mrs Average Shopper.  A bit of the job is about educating and we have to get the information out there to encourage people to try something new.

No one has the confidence to try something they don’t know, so as well as making sure the information is on the shelf, we also do about 20 to 30 tastings a year. At the end of the day our job isn’t about buying but selling."

With the price issue of such importance to the team, it is not surprising to learn that price promotions make up to 30% of wine sales at the chain.  One of the supermarket’s most successful campaigns to date has been its "100 wines under £3" promotion.

"There is a lot of talk about sub £5 wine but sub £3 is also important to a lot of people and we’ve found that, through this promotion, our customers were buying wine instead of going down the pub," says Purdy.

"We actually encouraged people to buy more wine and now the initial increase in sales in the sub £3 category has translated into growth in the over £4 and £5 group.  We want to continue with it for as long as we can, as long as the exchange rate allows, really. We find that BOGOFs don’t really work for us, the customer can’t really see the saving.  We are better off doing money discounts."

But there are only so many price promotions a supermarket, and its suppliers, can afford and with consumers that are, as Purdy happily admits, "price junkies, on the whole" and with little customer loyalty – "They’ll buy Jacobs Creek if it’s on offer and next week, when it’s Lindemans on promotion, they’ll buy Lindemans" – there have to be other ways of persuading customers to buy more or pay more.

For this reason the team at Morrisons spends much time and effort on the theatre of their department and, since they have been very much concentrating on the wine half of the wine and spirits department for the past few years, it is this aisle that has received much of the attention.

"We try and make sure that the customer is not faced with a wall of bottles," says Spurs. "We need to make sure that people don’t just come into the aisle and find their favourite tipple and leave, but that they spend time looking at price promotions or things they haven’t tried before.

If a customer comes in and wants a Hardys red and goes out with a Hardys red, we would be disappointed.  We want them to go out with a white as well. So, what we have to try and do is create impulse purchases where, within three or four seconds, they pick up the product and put it in their basket.

If they have to look too long or too hard then the impulse will dissipate."  Surprisingly, since there is this emphasis on the importance of theatre, the team does not employ designers (perhaps it’s that "down to earth" northern attitude that doesn’t trust anyone with anything so pretentious as "designer" after their name?).

Instead, they talk with department managers to find out what they would like and develop the ideas from there.  The concept that the team now works with, is to recreate the feel of a wine cellar in the aisle. Quiet and enclosed, it should create a calm atmosphere for browsing. The team even went as far as to investigate the possibility of creating a wine cellar smell that could be pumped into the aisle, although that was abandoned when Purdy felt it smelled like wet sawdust more than anything else.

"I came to Morrisons from Bottom’s Up," says Purdy. "What I liked most about it here, was that the department was more or less a Bottom’s Up in a supermarket. We don’t have dead straight aisles but break them up with curved shelves, free standing stacks and very good POS. In a lot of the stores we have low canopies with overhead lighting.

The customer can go and pick up their tomato sauce, baked beans or whatever but when they get to our department it’s an area that doesn’t feel rushed, that there isn’t someone coming up behind them trying to get into another aisle."

There has also been much effort put into not intimidating the customer.  As previously mentioned the term "fine wine" has been banned. It has been replaced by the term "Something Special" and these wines are now incorporated into the rest of the ranges, rather than keeping them separate where, it was found, sales fell.

On the other hand, the team has had much success with its rosé lines by stocking them in a designated "Drink Pink" display.  "They used to get lost in amongst the rest of the wines before," says Purdy. "But we’ve seen a significant increase in sales since we started this concept."

In the near future the team hopes to create more links between food and wine with dual offers.  "Buy a bottle and get £1 off a pizza," says Purdy. He also hopes this will help bring wine out into the rest of the store a bit more.

There are also moves to promote the European ranges with promotions planned for Spain and Vin de Pays soon and ongoing promotions for Italy and Germany. With wine sales at the chain increasing year on year – 20% increase last year alone – it looks as if that "down to earth" approach really does work when selling wine.   Just keep those ponytails at bay.