Grocery shopping is going through a digital transformation and Albertsons Companies wants to be at the forefront of it.
Albertsons has a goal to “create a magical customer-centric digital ecosystem” by using intuitive digital tools that simplify the shopping process and offer more personalized and well-being suggestions for how to eat, live and feel better,” says Francisco Bram, vice president of marketing & customer insights, Albertsons Companies.
“Customers are now getting more familiar with personalization, convenience, and dynamic pricing,” he adds. “The next six months grocery retailers are going to be reevaluating their investments in technology, focusing on digital transformation, enhancing expanding private label products.”
The retail chain recently launched a tool that allows them to look at a customer’s entire shopping history with Albertsons and connect that information back to USDA MyPlate guidelines. With this data, the company can then let them know if they are under or over indexing on protein, fruits, veggies, and then recommend the necessary steps for the individual to improve their overall nutrition. “It’s completely free. We’re just leveraging data to enhance that customer journey and show customers we truly care about their health and well-being,” explains Bram. “Retailers will use customer data more and more to enhance customer experiences.”
Prior to joining Albertsons about three years ago, Bram held senior marketing roles at Uber and Siemens. Brand Innovators caught up with Bram from his office in the San Francisco Bay Area to discuss retail media networks, earning grocery points for exercising and how growing up on a farm in Portugal has helped shape his approach to leadership. This interview has been edited for clarity and length.
How are we thinking about digital transformation?
It’s really the path we charted to help build customers for life. Our strategy was when I first joined, almost three years ago, how do we seamlessly integrate digital technology into the various customer journeys that we identified? For example, we know customers are looking for convenience and inspiration for what to eat. They’re also looking for what to buy that aligns with their health and well-being goals. Our goal is to connect these different journeys together through digital technology, and also enhance the offline and online experience with our brands.
How are you building loyalty with customers?
I’ve learned that a grocery customer shops up to five different grocery store brands on average. They look for what’s most convenient, cost-effective and rewards. In order to build customer loyalty, we have to find customers where they’re at and remove a little bit of the perception that grocery shopping is just about filling and stocking up your pantry. It’s just a chore. We started running a lot of customer research studies and learned that an average person thinks about food 226 times a day. It’s a lot of cognitive load created just by thinking about food. It’s about how they eat it, how to cook it, how to plan the meal. It’s also about what’s healthy for you. And if you’re the primary shopper, what’s healthy for your household?
It was important that we start to build programs that give customers delightful moments as they interact with us so that they feel like they would be missing out on something if they decide to go somewhere else just because it’s closer.
For instance, we launched a platform that contains over 9,000 proprietary free recipes. A customer can determine that they want to shop for recipes that are vegan friendly or they don’t have peanuts and we can populate those recipes personalized to your health and well-being goals. And it’s all shoppable so you can with one click add all the ingredients to your cart and use flash delivery, which means we can deliver all the ingredients within 30 minutes with step-by-step instructions on how to cook it.
How are you supporting consumers as they navigate inflation and deal with tighter budgets?
We are acutely aware of the financial pressures customers face. We think about ways to make grocery shopping not just magical, but also so that it doesn’t break the wallet. We partner closely with CPG brands to offer discounts on products. In our app, we have a deals section. It’s the most visited section in our entire digital experience. Customers can find coupons that they can clip automatically to their wallet so that at checkout, all these discounts can apply automatically.
The other way we also offer ways to save is through continuously expanding our own private label products. We have a lot of healthy, fresh, own brand products and we’re constantly launching new SKUs. Not only are they high quality, but they come at a lower price.
Finally, we’ve built ways for customers to make healthier choices, earn for being more active and in exchange to save on their grocery bill. For example, with the launch of Sincerely Health, we allow customers to make better, more informed decisions in terms of what to buy that aligns with their health and well-being goals. You can set up a goal like, “I want to walk 10,000 steps” and you can connect the device to our Apple Watch in our app. Once you accomplish this 10,000 steps you would earn discounts on grocery products.
How are you working with brands in your retail media network?
Our Albertsons Media Collective is our arm that works with brands. Their goal is to thoughtfully integrate digital advertising to enhance, not disrupt the shopping experience. If I’m already buying with you, I want to see ads. We’ve actually learned that customers do enjoy advertising as long as advertising is contextually relevant to that customer journey.
If I’m buying produce and you’re featuring a specific ad for avocados, that is compelling and enhances my journey versus, of course, featuring an advertisement for something completely unrelated to my journey. The goal is to partner with brands and insert those brand ad experiences into these different journeys, not just the one size tall, but personalize it to those journeys. How do we make advertising more of a customer enhancement versus a distraction? Our partnerships are really designed to deliver mutual value, delivering CPG brand visibility.
We have 39 million loyalty customers who engage with our brand frequently. We support 55 million households. And so we have an opportunity to add visibility to CPG brands but we believe the most impactful way to do so is by offering customer deals and products aligned with their momentary experience and customer journey. We are trying to strike that balance between giving brands the visibility they need while offering customers products that are relevant to them.
What is your approach to leadership?
I grew up on a small farm in Portugal and my grandfather was an agricultural engineer. The most delightful moments of my childhood were spent cultivating the fields. I took that as a lifestyle approach for myself. I’m a cultivator at heart. I love to approach leadership with care and dedication, just like a gardener would nurture the garden. So to nurture my team, my brand, my customers the same way. that means, paying attention to the details, being consistent in the delivery of our goals, and being very transparent about how our goals are delivered. Also, create a purpose. When you’re cultivating a garden, the purpose is to see it flourish. So I empower my team with clear objectives, connecting them back to a purpose.
For example, we’re launching Sincerely Health, a platform to allow customers to live healthier. And one of our goals would be to measure how many customers have actually improved their health score since the launch. that creates meaning that creates excitement. It keeps us in touch with customer needs. It’s really important to always emphasize why we’re doing it. I also believe that success is not an overnight creation, just like cultivating a garden, it’s a series of small consistent steps that would lead to great leaps. I like to nurture a culture where we celebrate small wins, where there’s kindness, we drive for growth, while at the same time, keeping the customers as the North Star.
Are there any other career positions that you’ve held that help give you perspective for this current role?
At Uber, it is a culture where we move fast. And we use data to inform decisions. But the way to get data is not to sit around and hope that data comes to us. It’s about learning and experimentation and extracting insights from. That was really something I took with me when I came to this role. Albertsons is a retailer, it’s been around for a long time and so I brought in some of that learning experimentation mindset. It is okay to fail and take risks, as long as we learn from these, and we build playbooks for the future. And so many of the tools and technologies and even campaigns that we ran were experiments.
We were constantly testing out new ways to reach customers and new ways to connect with customers at a deeper level. Sometimes it’s a home run, sometimes it’s not but that’s part of the experience. Creating that culture where people feel empowered to take risks is really important.
