Lidl is renowned worldwide for its bakery offering, which in the United States offers a mix of European and American treats.
PG: These [bagels] are made on site?
FK: They are baked fresh daily, multiple times a day, in the store, [after being] shipped from a New York supplier to our stores chainwide. Then another big thing that we were missing, we were completely devoid of muffins as well. We 1722463628 have two new muffins, a blueberry muffin and then a chocolate muffin that we brought in. So, in our bakery department, we 1722463628 have a perfect mix where you’ve got U.S.-produced products that the U.S. consumer expects, and then you have a great unique blend of some European products that, quite frankly, are just unmatched by any of our competitors within the market. My personal favorite is the Rosemary Olive bread.
PG: How do you determine which features to include in stores? Do you do a lot of consumer research? Do you survey consumers?
FK: I’m lucky enough to [work with] the consumer insights team as part of the chief customer officer role, staying very connected to the customer understanding what they’re telling us and where we can improve and what we know that we’re doing really well. Our customers appreciate our value proposition, our pricing, [but] what we have to work on is some of the layout of the store and some of the adjustments of the adjacency to improve that shopping experience to really get to the ethos of who we are as an organization of simplicity.
Do you know this value equation? It’s price, quality and then what you provide to the shopper that’s coming into your store each day. We have time studies that we’ve done and some heat-map analysis of our stores. A consumer can come to any one of our locations, and on average, they could do a completely full shop, save up to 40% against national brands on prices, and – what we think is really important as well – save 17 minutes of their time during that shop in one of our stores. We view that complex value proposition as delivering on price, delivering on quality, not sacrificing on either one of those, but then also the value of giving them time back to their days, because [it’s] a busier world than ever.
PG: It sounds like you’re constantly fine-tuning that experience and looking at what your consumers are telling you, or what you’ve gleaned from their shopping patterns. Do you use individual stores, or have you used individual stores, as testing grounds for particular programs?
FK: There are definitely some things that we test in individual stores. I won’t name the store in particular, but we do have one store that is kind of our test for our new layout, our new flow of our store, our new adjacency. We do have some really exciting stuff coming up in the pipeline that I’m sure we’ll talk to you guys about soon.
PG: We’re eagerly awaiting that.
FK: One thing we launched nationwide this week is [an enhancement of] the customer shopping experience both offline and how it relates to online. We made some upgrades to our myLidl app. It’s our loyalty program. Our customers can typically, on average, save a couple hundred dollars a month by going through it, and so take advantage of even better prices. It has now allowed us to make that customer journey much more simple for them on that app to where they see the myLidl deals for all members, but then there’s also the element of personalized offers that come in on time. We have made a lot of improvements on the back end to really enrich our customer data to provide a better personalized offer to the customer.
[RELATED: Consumers Expect More Out of Loyalty Programs]
That went live this past week, and another enhancement that we have [is] quick signup on our registers. It’s really important for any new stores, particularly like Fresh Meadows here, where we don’t have a full pool of customers already signed up on the loyalty platform. We’ll be able to do a quick register right at the point of sale here, type in their phone number to take advantage of all the myLidl rewards, and then we’ll have a follow-up journey with them to go through and do the full-profile buildout and sign up to take advantage of more personalized offers going forward.
That wasn’t something that was there before. For the customer to get signed up to the app on site, they’d have to download it. It’s not a cumbersome process, but it still holds up the line and it can be a little bit stressful on the customer. We wanted to completely eliminate that, make it as quick and easy, seamless [and] painless as possible for the customer to be able to take advantage of all those myLidl rewards and personalized offers.