For Grocers, Being Picky Pays Off

Grocery Net Promoter Score® and customer perception

Being Picky Pays Off

Customer advocacy leaders tend to outperform on certain key performance criteria, but pick their battles carefully.

• View KPC rankings

Grocery Net Promoter Score® and customer perception

Customer advocacy leaders tend to outperform on certain key performance criteria, but pick their battles carefully.

What does it take for a grocer to become a customer advocacy winner? Bain's recent survey of more than 17,000 US grocery shoppers found that loyalty leaders don't necessarily aim to be the best at everything. Instead, they carefully pick their battles, focusing on specific criteria to carve out unique value propositions that their shoppers love and that differentiate them from the competition. Our research shows that the top four grocers by Net Promoter Score® collectively outperform their peers across a number of dimensions, capturing more than half of the top four key performance criteria rankings in our survey, despite representing fewer than 15% of retailers included in our survey. While each of these four retailers has used a different mix of ingredients to build its value proposition, each one represents a recipe for customer advocacy success.

Aaron Cheris leads Bain & Company's Retail practice in the Americas; he is based in the firm’s San Francisco office. Lisa Koetter is a Bain partner based in Boston, and Casey Taylor is a Bain partner based in San Francisco; both are members of the firm’s Retail practice.

Net Promoter®, Net Promoter System®, Net Promoter Score® and NPS® are registered trademarks of Bain & Company, Inc., Fred Reichheld and Satmetrix Systems, Inc.