OPINION: Why promotions are essential for Kay Patel’s Best-one store

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It’s for this reason we produce a lot of offers our self for these ranges.

We try to ensure that each bay has at least two highly visible offers, customers may well not buy them but I believe it reinforces a message of value to the rest of the products on the bay.

Offers can become repetitive, especially when it’s the bigger brands that usually have the deep pockets to pay for extra margin to run them but we find that by changing the promo mechanic every time it keeps the offer fresh/interesting

You can also capitalise on Black Friday, seasonal, for example our seasonal count lines are 2 for £1 throughout rather than just one period before or during the season and as a result we’ve seen greater sales volume compared to when we did not.

I believe in the power of promotions not just because the industry or manufacturers tell me but because as a multiple site operator I have tested sites against each other with a control store not running a promotion and also the difference made from changing the promotional mechanic.

For example an insight from this has been that customers were more likely to buy wine at a reduced single bottle price at a higher margin rather than on a two for £x deal, even if the deal was really competitive. As a result for the past few years now we have been changing some wine offers provided by Best One from ‘two-for-£x’, to single bottle promotion ourselves. From this we have benefitted from not only a higher margin but also a higher rate of sale.

In some cases it doesn’t make sense to simply keep the additional margin and shift only a few boxes. I just remember Tesco’s old adage – “pile ‘em high and sell ‘em cheap!” – it worked for them (or at least it used to anyway!)