How Social Media Is Ruining Our Minds
Author: Krikor
Live Life Light
Fresh Market & Diavlo
Fresh Market is a Polish chain of convenience-type stores with 100 POS today and a foreseen potential of 500 stores in the future, part of Zabka Polska.
Diavlo is one of my favorite fonts, it is a free font that contains 5 weights: Light, Book, Medium, Bold and Black.
Fresh Market used Diavlo in a very creative way in their logo and brand identity with a small change in the initial F and adding a flower that is a freshness symbol.
The Ball Is Here
Official Adidas Euro 2012 Ball *Tango 12) is already on the market all over Europe in Adidas stores and selected sport retailers.
Toys “R” Us in Poland
US-based toy retailer Toys “R” Us wants to spend €44.5m on opening 20 stores within the next five years in Poland.
Toys “R” Us invested €2.2m in its first store in Poland, which opened 3 weeks ao in Warsaw’s Blue City shopping centre. The store surface is 2,400 m² and offers about 8,000 products, including major brands as well as private label brands not available in other toy stores.
The store is stocked through the company’s existing distribution channels in Europe.
Snickers 5+1
A pan-European Snickers 5+1 Promotion
Economy vs Jumbo
US shoppers buy value-added (jumbo) packs and are used to the concept of buying in big quantities (maybe not all of them), without taking into consideration their daily consumption habits even in small families, but they understand the value of what they are getting and on the long run they are definitely cutting their average basket cost.
While warehouse club retailers like Costco, Sam’s Club or BJ’s Wholesale Club charge their clients a memberships cost anywhere from $50 to $100 a year and market the idea that shoppers can save more than the membership cost by shopping at these stores, consumers have different opinions: warehouse prices are not necessarily the best, the yearly fee is not always recouped and shopping at a warehouse is stressful.
In Europe, shoppers are not used much to warehouse clubs and it is not a very popular retail concept, except the Cash&Carry stores of Metro or Selgros targeting mainly the HORECA sector. But instead supermarkets and hypermarkets are offering more and more value added packs, but there are no clear figures about the shares of these Jumbo packs versus the regular ones, nor from the brand principles, neither from the stores, who are very discreet on their checkout figures.
In Lebanon, consumers are quite far from the shopping behavior of both US and EU and Jumbo packs are not very popular, except few brands/products and who while offering these packs are worried about the shelf take-off and think if the shoppers want to buy them, because nobody wants to carry a 10kg washing powder bag.
A380 From The Cockpit
Airbus A380 on Paris-Charles de Gaulle Airport runway from the cockpit of my flight. Air France is the 1st European airline to fly the A380.
Private Label in 2012
In the last few years, supermarket shoppers became more shrewd and have more expectations from all food retailers and in return they assume retails will help them save money in 2012 by offering higher quality of private label products with every day low prices.
In my opinion, 2012 will be the year of consumers switching from international brands to private labels and in some cases, the other way around, because of the information surplus they have in hand and mainly because of quick and fast access to prices through their smart phones and retailers apps which are also becoming very trendy and will keep on pushing forward next year.
Also strong social media reach in the US and main Western European markets is giving shoppers an immediate power, credibility and an increasing authorization over brands and own-brands.
