Pandemic: A case study in Superior Customer experience with lesser choices

How did retailers make customers believe they have better availability in a period when high amount of SKUs were unavailable?

With the onset of pandemic in 2020, it was clear to retailers that shoppers didn’t really care about price. What they cared about was availability. Retailers noted that what started first with toilet paper unavailability, soon went to other household categories like sanitizers and cleaners and later to home goods categories unavailability.

Retailers were forced to take a lot of their SKUs out of shelf and deepen their buys of specific SKUs which were doing well.

What happened was shoppers actually responded positively to this move. Shoppers felt that retailers’ stocking was better (even though it was lesser than before!). Retailers in turn saw better profitability since they had to invest in lesser number of SKUs and they understood the long term advantage of SKU curation.

Now, in 2021, brands are looking to reintroduce many of these SKUs.

We expect the retailers will push back and use this as an opportunity to relook at Terms of trade and get better terms.