On average, a typical U.S. superstore like Walmart, Target, Meijer, Wegmans, SuperValu or Safeway can have north of 100,000 distinct SKUs on their shelves. Nirvana for these retailers is uncovering ways to drive more traffic to their stores and drive more items off their shelves. It’s a complex problem to identify retail traffic drivers, which can include:

• Products made exclusively for one chain
• Items from the retailer’s most recent circular
• Products in portion sizes that may be best for your household
• Item that best reflect the retailer’s brand promise.

Some retailers are using Traffic Driving Potential (TDP) research to proactively determine precisely which products should be featured in their circulars. The most effective circulars are created by knowing marketers who use consumer feedback from research studies to optimize the content of each circular. 

Since retailers spend millions on color circulars, featuring the right products at the right prices is more of a science than art. At Affinnova, we conduct this quantitative, choice-based research to help retailers determine the products with the highest Traffic Driving Potential (TDP), products with highest price sensitivity and products with highest potential for In-Store Conversion:

• “Price Aggressive Motivators” are items like brand-named chips or cola at a discount
• “In-Store Converters” might be a cool new cleaning gadget at a decent price point
• “Supporting Cast” could be jeans for your son at an aggressive everyday price.

Back to school? Black Friday? Holiday shopping? Spring? Summer? Depending on the theme of the circular, different products will be the most captivating.

And how about me? Aren’t I resistant to those circulars? Nirvana for me is to get the shopping off my ‘to do list’ (TDL) so that I can provide for my family but get back to whatever activity I’m most needed for. Can circulars captivate consumer recall and desire enough that they alter the direction of consumer’s cars…including mine?

Yes, when my eye got stuck on those darn Lay’s Potato Chips on sale at one of the big retailers! Did I really go out of my way to shop there because two bright yellow bags of chips were going to cost me a buck less if I went to that store? That’s the power of price aggressive motivators derived from sound research. The minute I saw those chips, I found myself combing the circular for all the other things my household might need—that circular all but drove my car to the store!

For retailers, what’s going to happen when summer comes? Is it as easy as just pasting a grill on the front page of a circular or are other products the ones with the true TDP (Traffic Driving Potential)? Which retailer will increase the number of trips we take to their stores, simply because they’re paying attention to the details? And once we walk through the door, what end caps and other in-store promotional activities are they working on from the results of that research to be the in-store cart builders they dream about?

As for me, those two huge bags of Lay’s Original Potato Chips rode in the cart’s kid seat so they didn’t get mangled under the weight of the 60 other things I bought!

Follow Julie on Twitter: @julie1research.