Uncrowd claims its pre-Xmas foresight about the best UK grocers is vindicated by official sales

Experience analytics firm, Uncrowd, used its data technology to assess the experience of shopping in the leading eight UK grocery stores before Christmas 2023.

It correctly predicted Sainsbury’s would be the supermarket with the biggest revenue gain over Christmas – “nearly a week before Kantar’s official numbers were released,” said CEO and Founder, Richard Hammond.

But Morrisons was still rated its overall winner for its price, quality, speed, fresh and premium options.

Kantar Worldpanel recently revealed that British supermarket Sainsbury’s saw sales rise 9.3% in the four weeks from 1-24 December 2023 in the crucial pre-Christmas trading period, giving the grocer its highest UK market share (15.8%) since December 2020.

According to Uncrowd’s Christmas Grocery 2023 report entitled 'Sleighing It! UK Grocery at Christmas', Sainsbury’s was always likely to be the revenue winner during the present cost of living (COL) crisis because it was the standout in its ‘Stretching the Christmas Budget’ category.

This measures a family’s main shop on a tight budget, with preferences evident for fresh food, plenty of options on the shelves and budget choices, alongside family one-off necessities to mark the special occasion for this squeezed middle segment of the marketplace.

The discounters, Aldi and Lidl, did well in Kantar’s market segment focused exclusively on value. They also performed well in Uncrowd’s assessment of their specialist area.   

Methodology  

The firm made its own predictive assessments before Christmas 2023 during the capture period running from 14th-19th December 2023. Its 17 ‘secret agents’ visited 69 UK grocery stores nationwide providing 72,450 observations to feed into its assessment methodology.

More than 1100 observations result from each visit, so no second guessing is possible during the latter data crunching element of the process that relies on Uncrowd’s proprietary AI algorithms.

These generate a statistical comparison dataset across the eight leading UK grocers selected for measurement. Six quality control measures are in place, covering geotagging, button timing, control metrics and so on.

The ‘experience analytics’ concentrate on what is it like to shop a given store, and how might that experience then drive subsequent preferences and performance.

Weightings are allocated to each observation and variable, which can be adjusted dynamically to synthesise different types of customer story. A panel of experts oversees the process. Key metrics include:

• Relative Attractiveness (RA): This metric looks at which shopping experience is relatively more attractive than the others, and why? RA can be studied across every single observation gathered by the quants in the field, and groups of observations such as examination of shopping journey phases.

•  Friction/Reward Indexing: In order to obtain the RA of any given experience, the vendor observes and compares two categories of variables:

  --- Frictions: meaning anything that gets in the way of a good shopping experience &

  --- Rewards: which is anything that adds to the experience.

  Frictions are all those things that stand between the shopper and their ultimate goal, whether that is value, luxury, speed, convenience or whatever. Rewards are everything that the shopper gets back from having chosen this retailer versus another.

Morrisons
The predictive data technology and procedure run by Uncrowd identified Morrison’s as its overall winner for the best shopping experience over the Christmas 2023 peak period – before trading had actually ended. This aligns with Kantar’s post-Christmas data which shows that spending at Morrisons did actually increase by 3.2%, with its share of the UK grocery marketplace now standing at 8.8%.

“Our data showed Morrisons as overall winner on customer experience (CX) over Christmas, but that’s not necessarily a predictor of who will make highest returns,” said Uncrowd’s CEO and Founder, Richard Hammond. “A retailer can deliver a great experience, but if they don't know exactly why it’s better than others, and tell people about it, that advantage is meaningless. That’s why retailers need relative competitive data: when you know why you're winning, you can drive effective comms [and follow-up strategies].”

Although the revenue leap in Morrison’s Kantar figures didn’t match that if Sainsbury’s, the supermarket did still perform extremely well. Uncrowd considered it to be the best performer against its range of experience metrics and it was rewarded for its good work on the bottomline.  

Good experiences do ultimately lead to good results, as Kanter’s figures have now proven, since the predictions were first made.