Seafood
March 16, 2009
If you really want to grow the frozen seafood category, Catalina has some data — and advice — for you.
Who knew? A relatively tiny percentage of your shoppers are buying the majority of the frozen seafood in your stores.
We asked St. Petersburg, Fla.-based Catalina Marketing to drill down into the category for us, in hopes of finding information that would help you sell more seafood, more profitably. It seemed a logical place to go, since Catalina sifts through data from more than 250 million transactions each week.
We’d read earlier that Catalina had established that for the average brand store-wide (not just seafood), just 2.5% of shoppers account for 80% of sales. That made us wonder how concentrated the numbers were in seafood. So we asked Catalina to focus on the frozen seafood category, for the last quarter of 2008. What the company found surprised us, and it will likely get your attention, too.
For example, did you know that only 2.6% of shoppers account for 54.3% of dollar sales of all frozen breaded seafood? Or that 4.6% of shoppers account for 63.5% of unbreaded seafood? Neither did we.
Brand Level
Those percentages get even more interesting at the brand level. For example, the following percentages of all consumers within Catalina’s Pointer Media Network (76% of the American grocery shopping population) make up 80% of the sales volume for these breaded seafood brands: Gorton’s, 6.16%; Van De Kamps, 1.9%; Seapak, 1.2%; and Mrs. Paul’s, 1.17%
So, in whatever manner you choose to do it, it certainly makes sense to identify your heavy seafood shoppers and deliver incentives to them. Todd Morris, senior vp of business development for Catalina, says it’s wise to offer not only incentives, but perhaps something as simple as a recipe, a suggested new use for a product, a new flavor/variety or merely a reminder to buy.
He points out that when buying frozen unbreaded seafood, shoppers purchase two or more units only 33% of the time. On average, there are 1.5 units per transaction. And for breaded seafood, shoppers purchase two or more units only 22% of the time. In this segment, the average transaction is comprised of 1.3 units. If you can trade these shoppers up to buy, say, three units instead of two, you’re obviously onto something good.
“If people are buying two units at a time, we might incent them to buy three on their next shopping trip. Over 10% of the people we give that incentive to will come in and buy three units within 14 or 20 days,” Morris notes.
One more reason to segment your shoppers: the heavy frozen seafood shopper typically spends $121 a year in the category versus just $30 for the light user, according to Catalina data. Morris points out that it’s wise to target shoppers who buy in the category more than once a year and try to build their consumption further.
Lent Isn’t Everything
Lent will be over soon, but that doesn’t mean the seafood category goes into hibernation. “We looked at a number of (frozen seafood) brands, and about 75% of their volume was moved in non-Lent weeks. The trick is to drive the business year-round.”
Laurie Wachter, senior vp, analytical services, Catalina, says that with more people eating at home instead of in restaurants because of the slow economy, retailers would do well to promote seafood in their meal solutions programs. This might include suggesting to customers that shrimp be included in a pasta meal, or that seafood be a part of meals several times a week.
It’s easy to get a handle on what products might be good for cross-merchandising with different types of seafood, she adds. People who buy frozen unbreaded seafood, for instance, buy more olives, spices and seasonings, she says. (See ‘Planning Cross-Promos?”)
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