We are now entering the peak summer months when our event activities really heat up. As things start to get busier, it’s important for all of us to stay focused on creating an enjoyable shopping experience for Meijer shoppers, driving sales and providing the excellent service Meijer has come to depend on from Elite Marketing Interactions. Striving to meet our Event Cart, Presentation and Appearance Standards and remembering that all EMI demonstration events are designed around the 3 Es—to entice, educate, and entertain customers, ultimately resulting in the sale of product—can help ensure that we meet those goals every day, in every store.
For customers, we become the face of Meijer with the multiple customer contacts we make at each event. That’s why we greet each customer with a positive “Welcome to Meijer.” This welcoming approach puts a smile on shoppers’ faces and shows Meijer that we are representing them in the best possible light.
This warm greeting also opens the door to create a conversation around each product’s selling points. We encourage creativity (that maintains a professional manner) when engaging customers. The selling points provided for each event are meant to be used as an introduction for the engagement of shoppers, but “reading” each individual customer is essential to gaining an understanding of what he or she is looking for in the type of product being demonstrated.
We also try to appeal to shoppers’ visual senses by setting up a clean, attractive event cart with all point-of-sale materials and sampling requirements in place. The event cart presentation can be compared to the importance consumer packaged goods (CPG) companies place on the development of attractive packages to entice shoppers to purchase their merchandise instead of another brand’s product. If our event presentation is not attractive to the consumer, then the product will not stand out.
Through each of these methods of engaging the customer, we are able to sell to all demographics for virtually every type of product. Our ability to entice, educate and entertain shoppers is punctuated with a sale of the product. That is the measurement that is used to show how effective and critical each Sales Advisor is to the selling process we perform.
For our customer, Meijer, and our vendor partners, we want to remain the best business solution in the industry. This can only be delivered by continuously focusing on improving on what we do. One area we are working on behind the scenes is improved signage for our carts to help in branding our events and making them more easily recognizable to shoppers. More details will be coming soon. On the front line, I encourage you to continually to strive to be your best and deliver value to our customer, Meijer, by executing quality events that provide a warm welcome, a smile and a sale.
