The purpose of The Five E’s to Better Price Image is to take a deep dive into understanding the processes behind your stores pricing and allow for changes to take place. Throughout the month of May, we will be uncovering each of the Five E’s and identifying action items you can take to improve and sustain your price image.

Let’s start with the first “E” to improve price image: EDUCATE.

Educate yourself:

This is your chance to understand the full life cycle of tags, price changes, team member responsibilities and get feedback from your customers.

Start by documenting the steps and timeline associated with updating signs, tags, and store displays. Conduct a walkthrough of the store with your team and consider asking the following questions to get the full picture of the process:

·       When are tags changed?

·       Who changes them?

·       When do prices get updated?

·       What is the order of price changes? Is it by department?

·       Who prints the tags? In-store? Headquarters? Warehouse?

Next, take a look at the type of messaging you are using in your store. What are you trying to convey to your customers and does your messaging achieve that outcome? This is an opportunity to connect with your regular customers during their shopping trip and get authentic feedback on their store and price perception.

Here are some tips for how to approach this:

1.      Ask open-ended questions. Ex. “When you walked in this morning, what caught your eye?”

2.     Engage throughout their shopping trip rather than at the checkout.

When you put yourself out there with the intent to learn, that’s exactly what’s going to happen. As you converse with your customers and team members, you’re going to stumble upon areas that may not have been noticeable to you before or may not have affected your process but does affect someone’s.

Stay tuned as we uncover the next “E” to improving your price image on May 11th.

At Storewise, we pride ourselves not only on our platform, but also on the deep wealth of industry knowledge and experience we offer to our partners. Storewise customers gain access to seasoned technologists, former grocery operators, CPG professionals, and support specialists ready to work together and strengthen their businesses.   

One such expert in our network is former Corporate Pricing Manager for HEB, John Ulmer. 

John offers 40+ years of retail industry experience and leadership roles with independent grocers. Through his numerous leadership roles in operations, John has led teams of over 400 employees and created tools that continue to be used daily. John’s experience leading the pricing and price optimization teams delivered improved price index, price image, and gross margin improvements across his organization.

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