#383: Stop & Shop: Increasing Customer Engagement by Leveraging In-store Technology

The company that would eventually become Stop & Shop was founded in 1914 when the Economy Grocery Store opened in Somerville, MA. In four short years, 32 stores made up the thriving grocery chain. By 1942, Stop & Shop, Inc. became the company’s official name, and expansion into surrounding states continued. Today, Stop & Shop is one of the several grocery brands operated by Ahold Delhaize, with roughly 400 stores located throughout New York, New England, and New Jersey. 

Stop & Shop was a finalist for this year’s Loyalty360 Awards at Loyalty360’s 2024 Loyalty Expo, taking home the Bronze Award in the Technology and Trends category for its innovation in engaging technology-adverse customers through in-store kiosks.   

Mark Johnson, CEO of Loyalty360, spoke with Per Jensen, Head of Loyalty at Stop & Shop, about the reason behind implementing the kiosks, improving personalization, and securing program support from organizational leadership. 

Watch the full interview here: https://youtu.be/4TtR5WL1qIw
Read the feature on Loyalty360 here: https://loyalty360.org/content-gallery/in-depth-exclusives/stop-shop-increasing-customer-engagement-by-leveraging-in-store-technology

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:05

Good afternoon, good morning. It's Mark Johnson from Loyalty360. I hope everyone's happy, safe and well. I want to welcome you back to another edition of our Leaders in Customer Loyalty series, where we speak with leading brands about what they're seeing and hearing on the front lines of customer channel and brand loyalty. Today we have the pleasure of speaking with Per Jensen. He is the head of loyalty at Stop and Shop. How are you today, per?

Speaker 2: 0:25

Doing good, mark Doing excellent, and I'm very glad to be here. Thank you for the opportunity.

Speaker 1: 0:35

Absolutely. Thank you for taking the time. It was great seeing you at the 2024 Loyalty Expo. Hopefully you had a wonderful time there and looking forward to this discussion Likewise. Thank you. First off, we'd like to start these on a more personal level, so it'd be great to know a little bit more about you and your background. And then, obviously, we'd love to know about your role at Stop and Shop, what you do there. You know what your focus is.

Speaker 2: 0:52

Yeah, let me see. I would say, you know, if I summarize, my background is a little bit eclectic. My first degree was in engineering, my second one in business, and so from an educational standpoint those two actually come well together in the role I'm in today. But other than that, my business experience kind of crosses consumer insights, advanced analytics, starting businesses. I started a business, started Catal marketing in in germany. I've worked in finance, I've worked with category management. So all those different perspectives they come together really nicely in this role and and I believe I've been able to elevate the, the value of loyalty to our company such that the interest at the leadership level has grown tremendously and there are some solutions. Maybe we talk about those today. That really has brought the attention of the leadership into the loyalty program that we have in place Okay, great, into the loyalty program that we have in place.

Speaker 1: 2:03

Okay, great, real quick. There are fun fact that something you enjoy outside of work jumping out on planes you know fluent in 18 languages. What's a fun fact.

Speaker 2: 2:14

Yeah, yeah, excellent. So I I flew gliders at at a young age, so these are full scale gliders. We built our own planes in the university. That's kind of one thing, but that's a long time back in time. And then I climbed Mount Chimborazo in Ecuador. It's a point on earth that gets closest to the sun, so it's a fascinating thing to try. I'm going to call it. The stupid thing was to do it without acclimatizing to the altitude first, and just go straight up. It was incredibly hard. I did that with a number of friends at a time. We were all in incredibly good shape, but still it was an incredible challenge to to make that, to make that climb okay excellent.

Speaker 1: 3:11

Uh, I'm not gonna try that, but uh, it sounds like a lot of fun. Uh, first off, uh, the stop and shop go rewards program a very successful program. Members can earn points, go points for groceries and or fuel savings. Can you tell us a little bit about how the program works, some of the benefits of the program and how consumers engage with the program when they join?

Speaker 2: 3:33

yeah, and let me just take a step back. We, we, um, and I don't know that the exact history, but going back 30 odd years, I believe, stop and Shop was one of the first retailers, maybe here in the US, to kind of offer up a loyalty program, and it was purely I'm going to call it offline, so it requires just a card, and the focus at that time was to collect an address and so you could do direct mail and send personalized offers out that way. Since then a lot of things have happened in tech, and now our focus is really to get consumers to interact with us through the web or the app, and that is kind of an overlay that we've put into our loyalty program. So that's what we call gold rewards, which requires you to interact with the program through an app or the web, and so in there you have kind of what I would call legacy ways of earning value or savings is, you spend $1, you get one point, pretty straightforward. Then we have an overlay of offers that run in the circular where you can earn additional points for buying single items or family of products and you can kind of accelerate the points that you earn within the program.

Speaker 2: 4:51

And then the latest overlay here is Go Rewards, where we then add in personalized offers. They're all fully digital and that's kind of where really the acceleration happens in terms of participation in value to shoppers. And within that, once you get to a certain point level, you can then go into the app and we call it designate your points. You can choose that to redeem for groceries or for fuel, and we have partnerships with Shell where you can go. We have our own gas stations where you can go and redeem those points, and then, furthermore, we kind of do some accelerators in there that the points you can also use to get we call them special offers, so it might be a $3 item. Let's say spinach that you get for low points, maybe 20 points only, right, so for 20 cents you can get a $3 item in reality. So we try to kind of boost the value that you can get out of the program in a number of different ways.

Speaker 1: 6:02

Excellent. You mentioned some of the legacy issues or opportunities or maybe even challenges that grocers have or you may have, but it's a big challenge for many brands. It was talked a good deal about the 2024 Loyalty Expo. How do you address that? How do you kind of work around legacy issues or even legacy behaviors, potentially to optimize the program in a manner that you would like to optimize the program?

Speaker 2: 6:24

Yeah. So we recognized a few years back that direct mail was getting too expensive for us to do on an ongoing basis. And you would say, okay, within the loyalty program we've got millions. We've got maybe 10 million households for whom we have the address for, and now we can't really reach them anymore. What's the value in terms of digital, of having information but you can't reach them in any digital way and through?

Speaker 2: 7:13

I'll keep this story short, but I would say I turned that weakness into a strength by looking at a solution to two problems I'm going to call it business challenge which is that digital coupons over the past few years have increased in becoming a larger pain point for shoppers. And because it's a pain point for shoppers, it kind of got elevated to consumer advocates. Consumer reports even send out a letter to the industry maybe a year and a half ago and from there it's even accelerated into legislation in a number of different states and we were kind of at the forefront of that. In trying to solve for that pain point, in conjunction with that weakness of most of our shoppers being I'm going to call it offline, we came up with a number of different solutions, but one of them that I'd like to highlight is it seems like simple, the kiosk, but with that kiosk we're enabling our shoppers that were offline now to interact with us online. But it's not a copy of the web experience. We made it simpler and really directed to that shopping trip you're making in the moment that week that you can get the offers that we have specifically for you, either personalized offers or mass offers that are fully electronic. Create awareness for it. There's a printout so you have an overview of what has been made available to you now, plus a referral to the weekly ad that we have. Pick that up, it's right there with the kiosk together. Pick those that up. It's right there with the kiosk together. Pick those things up. Now. Some people will use it as a shopping list.

Speaker 2: 9:10

The feedback has really been tremendous from our shoppers. I'll go there and I'll have a Stop and Shop shirt on and customers come up to me and I'll hear something like Mr Stop and Shop, this is the best thing you've done ever. And Mr Stop and Shop. I lived down the road by this ex-retailer, but now I just go to Stop and Shop. You've made it so easy for me and so that's kind of anecdotal. But then I look at the hard facts and it's been a smashing success In terms of participation, we're three times higher.

Speaker 2: 9:53

What we understand is an industry benchmark of what interaction participation you get with something like a kiosk In terms of incremental sales, in terms of other operational things that we deal with if we don't have the kiosk. For example, people can always get the offers available if they are a full offline customer, but you'd have to ask and that process can take too much time, and so it's a loss in time. For the customer, it's a big pain point, but also for the associates to to deal with it, and so we've solved for a number of different uh problems at the same time with one one solution, and there's probably seven or eight different dimensions to the problem and they all kind of come together really nicely.

Speaker 1: 10:52

Excellent, so you talked about personalization. Personalization is a very impactful opportunity for brands today. They want to make sure they have the right data, they can communicate with customers in the channel and the time they want to be communicating with the relevant offer. So you've talked about some of the challenges and opportunities you've looked at with regard to customer loyalty. The kiosk what does personalization mean to Stop and Shop and how are you affecting it in such an impactful way?

Speaker 2: 11:26

Yeah. So for us, what is personalization? It is first and foremost creating incentives for you to, and those incentives, we have a number of different categories around that. So one is a basket offer, two is a category offer, and then we have product offers and within those we can have different categories, purchase requirements. So for a basket offer it could be Mark, you'd have to spend $25. For me it might be $30. For somebody else, $50. Then we have the reward level. We deal with points, that's our currency, and that level as well can, as a percent of that threshold can, vary.

Speaker 2: 12:13

So now you have kind of multiple dimensions of you know, types of offers, and then there's a lot of constraints that we deal with. So if you just purchased detergent, we wouldn't want to give you an offer for detergent right now. We'd want to wait until it fits into your purchase cycle. So there's a lot of constraints as well that happen in the background. Business rules that we put in place, all these things kind of makes it mathematically very complex and computationally very intensive. And it's an area I worked in before I joined in the role I'm in now, and it's been super helpful to kind of think about how can we make improvements in how we approach personalization to get more sales maybe at the same cost, of more sales at a lower cost, just improving that over time. And we've made some really nice step changes in impact on the business over the past two and a half years that I've been in this role here at levels that again have kind of created interest from the leadership team and lots of good feedback from them.

Speaker 1: 13:35

Okay, you mentioned being able to operate at scale. Making improvements in the program and technology is a big piece of that, but there is a great deal of inherent complexity. Now, with the right technology, the MarTech stack is more diverse and complex than ever before. We've seen a number of the studies that we do that it's hard to keep up with that technology. So how are you managing your MarTech stack and how are you evaluating technology to keep up with the opportunities around personalization and customer loyalty? You know how do you keep up and what are some challenges that you see within your organization on managing these disparate platforms?

Speaker 2: 14:16

Yeah, yeah, I agree, it's a huge challenge. I worked in product management at some point in time within personalization and at the time, customer what did we call it? Customer data platforms were kind of growing and I was keeping, or somebody was keeping track of how many companies that were in that area and it was growing from. I I forget the numbers now, but uh, so as an just uh, from concept, right from 50 to hundreds into thousands.

Speaker 2: 14:51

I mean, it's, it's, it's, it's not even possible to understand that that thing, and of course, it's difficult for those companies to kind of create attention for themselves. So oftentimes you hear the same story, right? And so what's really unique about these technologies that really can help you? Now, I think that that is probably a very difficult angle to take and go out and evaluate technologies in that way. So, to kind of narrow it down, the approach that I'm taking is more a so objectives, goals, strategy, metrics, really being clear as to what are we trying to achieve. And then there are going to be certain things I'm looking for in terms of solutions to these kind of larger, you know, but all going in the same direction type of problems that may require technology, and so, uh, in, in that essence it was from.

Speaker 2: 16:02

For me it was to reach our offline customers. So a very different, uh kind of perspective to what problem to solve for, and that narrows down what technology is really to to consider. Yeah, what we. Then one of the things we ended up with was kiosk, but there are other things like point of sale, the self-checkout screen. It's in the flow of a customer through the store. You can reach every single person that way, and if we're smart about it not to slow down the lanes and the time you spend there, I believe there's a huge opportunity. So that doesn't require me to kind of go out and scan 10,000 different or 1,000 different companies. Now I can really narrow it down and think about what the experience should be and, with that in mind, then find the right solution.

Speaker 1: 16:57

Excellent. You talked about finding the right solution. Something discussed earlier is kind of building agreement within the organization, building momentum within the organization. You talked about that in your opening. That's also a very significant challenge for brands as well and we talked about that in our advisory board meeting at the conference, as you know. How do you do, or how do you approach, building alignment, building that executive engagement for your program?

Speaker 1: 17:24

Because it's very important, especially with this changing technology landscape. Right, you mentioned 10,000, 12,000, whatever it is this year, and everyone claimed to do the same thing. So how do you drive and build that agreement with your organization?

Speaker 2: 17:40

Yeah, it's not easy. I don't know if I have an easy answer, but what has helped me is I did work in sales when I built Catalina up in Germany. It's selling into a large organization and if you think about a sales approach like large account selling, that's the term I remember from years back. Might be a different term these days, but you can't be in your canoe on your own. You've got to get other people on board. Now, in the organization of stop and shop, that's one canoe we have.

Speaker 2: 18:23

I have four other sister companies, that's another canoe. I have a. I have a centralized services organization. That's a third canoe. So I have three canoes where I need to get people on board, and I have to. I have to be in all three of them at the same time.

Speaker 2: 18:41

So, but as a framework, I think of it as large account selling. You have to go out and really work with people, get their feedback early on, before a solution even comes, uh, comes on the table. Yeah, and so so I did was when I started in this role at Stop and Shop. I met with probably 150 individuals, not one-on-one in every single meeting. Some of them might have been a small group, a small team but across Stop and Shop all the different areas with sister companies. In my prior role I consulted for all the banners under Ajo del Haze so I was familiar. I had contacts around the larger umbrella company so that enabled me to kind of build alliances and align on what's important to the business and avoid blind spots. You know, the more information you can get you can also avoid blind spots that could be an unpleasant surprise later in the process.

Speaker 1: 19:54

Absolutely. Your program is very successful. You won, at the 2024 Loyalty Expo, a bronze award in the technology trends category. You know, aside from receiving validation of the program through the awards that Stop and Shop receives, what are one or two things that you are most proud of when it comes to the brand, with regard to, you know, building such a successful and impactful loyalty program?

Speaker 2: 20:24

Yeah, most proud of. I think most proud is really to be able to and I think we talked about that also before you know, sometimes loyalty is a little bit on the side, it's not easily understood you have to be knowledgeable in many different areas but it's also it's very I'm not going to say technical, analytical in being able to understand it but elevate really the. So, to me, I'm proud of being able to elevate the impact of loyalty and explain the story around loyalty to the exec leadership team and get them on board with big decisions uh, you know, smaller and bigger decisions we have, yeah, so accomplish that is really what I'm really really proud of. And something, yeah, I'm just super excited in the role I'm in today because of the results, the attention it's getting and the way that we're getting there.

Speaker 1: 21:33

Excellent. Are there any challenges that you see with regard to your program? Are there things that you would like to maybe do better in getting more alignment internally, having newer technology? If you could have one thing, would there be one thing that you'd wish?

Speaker 2: 21:47

for I think that would be something I would wish for. It's not possible, but you know the complexity is really high. So being able to kind of be more in control of destiny, rather than kind of have to have so many different canoes to think about at the same time, that would be perhaps the thing I would wish for.

Speaker 1: 22:09

That's awesome. When you look at Stop and Shop, what's next for your organization? What are you guys focused on? What can your customers expect from the engagement paradigm that you're putting forth? What's next?

Speaker 2: 22:26

So we tested the kiosk and now we're fully focused on rolling that out. I made sure we had the budget to do it. We got significant funding to support it. So under these times it's often hard to do more and oftentimes it's just do more with less. So at the same time we're doing more with less, but also we've been able to secure substantial funding to roll this out. So that's kind of immediate in front of us. So it's pure execution right now and do that with excellence, and then from there it is really. There's a couple of things. Depending on the kind of technical complexities, we have an option to think about the POS, the self-checkout, and integrate loyalty with that experience.

Speaker 2: 23:28

Or another vector would be we have a device we call ScanIt. Customers that use it, they love it, and we have an opportunity to expand our reach with our personalized offers through that device. So one of those two would be the next for us to expand what we know is working into a group that may not be participating today.

Speaker 1: 23:56

Excellent, okay, lastly, a little bit self-serving what can Loyalty360 do to help you and your team with regard to customer loyalty?

Speaker 2: 24:08

So I like the roundtables that you have One thought around. It would be just like maybe a similar format, like the panel, so to have a pre-selected group with a topic and the three, the five of them us are in the conversation, prepared around a specific topic and we can kind of bounce forth and back. Because what I'm looking for to get out it's just inspiration. There's not specific knowledge I'm looking for. It could be somebody's experience. It could be also that you can have. I think you've had some potential vendors out there talking about how they go about things and the research they've done. That's also interesting, just for inspiration. So what I'm really looking for is just inspiration. Different angles people are taking uh is is fascinating to to hear about and that's awesome.

Speaker 1: 25:04

I know we talked about that at the advisory meeting, uh, on the first day and do that. I'm pretty sure you just volunteered for a session, so I have a couple sessions in mind. I'll be back to you today in regard to getting those teed up and looking forward to doing more of those, for sure, and appreciate, obviously, everything you do as well. So, for the industry, because you are one of the stalwarts within the industry, for sure.

Speaker 2: 25:24

Thank you.

Speaker 1: 25:25

Absolutely. And now we have time, we have the awesome quick fire questions. We like to limit these to one word or short phrase answers. So the first question is what is your favorite word, super? What is your least favorite word?

Speaker 2: 25:41

No, especially when the sentence starts with no.

Speaker 1: 25:45

Okay, good. What excites you?

Speaker 2: 25:49

Finding and solving complex business problems, and the finding is difficult, it's really difficult.

Speaker 1: 25:56

And what do you find tiresome?

Speaker 2: 25:58

Routine.

Speaker 1: 26:00

What is your favorite aisle to browse at? Stop and Shop?

Speaker 2: 26:04

Ice cream. I bike at least 200 miles a week, and so a little bit of ice cream is helpful.

Speaker 1: 26:11

Excellent. What book do you like to recommend to colleagues?

Speaker 2: 26:17

Behavioral economics. Types of books I love, for example, blink Tipping Point. I look forward to Revenge of the Tipping Point coming out pretty soon. Books like that I just love and absorb and I think it's really valuable for what we do in business, but also for loyalty.

Speaker 1: 26:36

A hundred percent. I have a couple of recommendations back to. I'm not sure if you've read Magic Word by Jonah Berger. For what we do in business, but also for loyalty A hundred percent. I have a couple of recommendations back to. I'm not sure if you've read Magic Word by Jonah Berger. Magic Words by Jonah Berger came out earlier this year. He's a Wharton professor. A very interesting book around how to phrase words and what words actually drive behavior in a measurable perspective. And also when I just forgot who that was by Daniel Pink. I'm not sure why I forgot that. As you know, daniel Pink, I talked to him a couple of times, but when? By Daniel Pink, another great book.

Speaker 2: 27:03

Yes, yeah, I love those. Another one I think it was called Nudge. Yeah, you know, it's all those. I really can absorb them, so I just loved it A hundred percent.

Speaker 1: 27:15

That's great. What profession other than the one you currently have?

Speaker 2: 27:21

would you like to attempt, If it's a long, kind of the? You know, maybe I'm not on a straight line in terms of my what I've done, but I find corporate strategy fascinating and so we're taking a really strategic approach to loyalty and I'd love to kind of apply that to larger business problems just outside loyalty.

Speaker 1: 27:47

Okay, and who inspired you to become the person that you are today.

Speaker 2: 27:53

Both my dad and my uncle I would would say even my grandmother they came from very difficult circumstances. My dad and my uncle, they grew up in in what was still the last slum in copenhagen. Denmark is where I'm. I've spent most of my life, but they are. They've just been uh, hardworking, very creative, super smart and very you know, they've been at the forefront of the whatever they decided they wanted to do. One was in academics, the other one as a business person, and so they were both kind of great inspirations for me and my grandmother. She was, uh, she was helping people in her town. She was well, without going into all the details, she was just helping people that were in difficult circumstances, and something that has inspired me as well.

Speaker 1: 28:48

Excellent, and what's the last thing you think about, or what do you like to think about at the end of the day? End of business day, business day, your work day, your personal day.

Speaker 2: 29:03

Yeah, so I. We have three children. Two of them are 5,000 miles away. So one of the things that I think about is just how are they doing? And maybe they they wrote something on our private chat and just reading about it I might look at a picture and and that just brings me tremendous, tremendous joy. Then the for business. It's not every day, but there will be days where it's a business problem. What's what's next? And if that becomes, you know, sometimes it's an opportunity. So trying to solve our problem, sometimes there is, let's say, a more kind of ways of working problem that gets in the way of getting things done and then it helps to go on a 200-mile bike ride and that kind of resolves many of those issues.

Speaker 1: 29:58

Excellent. Well, per, thank you very much for taking the time to speak with us today. Thank you for giving us an overview of the amazing Stop and Shop program. It's great to hear your approach and how you are driving the internal organization to such heights, and obviously the program is driving the results as well. So thank you very much for taking the time. It was great speaking with you and look forward to hearing more from you soon.

Speaker 2: 30:20

Likewise, I enjoyed this and thank you so much for the opportunity to talk about what we've achieved at StopShot.

Speaker 1: 30:25

Absolutely, and everyone. Thank you for taking the time to join us today. Make sure you join us back for another edition of our Leaders and Customer Loyalty series and until then, have a wonderful day.