Turning convenience shopper behaviour into a category growth plan

The business question

Arla needed to understand where dairy could play a stronger role in convenience retail. That meant looking beyond the milk fixture: why people visited a store, what they intended to buy, what caught their attention and where products fitted into the rest of the shop.

The task was to turn that understanding into a channel strategy and ideas the business could examine in a realistic retail setting.

Building the evidence

I led the programme through Visuality, bringing together several ways of understanding the shopper:

• Analysis of more than 500 complete shopping journeys filmed in a working Co-op store in Leeds.
• A week of mobile ethnography with 120 shoppers, exploring their shopping, households and convenience needs.
• A survey of 1,250 convenience shoppers, including structured trade-offs to identify which needs mattered most.
• Further in-store work examining dairy buying and points of friction.

This connected what shoppers said mattered with the choices they made in the store. It also allowed us to separate needs shared across the market from those specific to particular shoppers and missions.

Finding the commercial opportunity

The analysis examined the journey from passing a category to noticing it, considering a product and buying. For milk, it pointed to an opportunity to improve engagement with the category, alongside the choice people made once they reached it.

Recommendations addressed category visibility, layout and point-of-sale material, as well as pack formats and the role dairy could play in food-to-go and top-up missions. That gave the category team practical options to evaluate, with a clear explanation of the shopper need behind each one.

Making the ideas testable

I built a virtual store in Blender, modelled on the real store used for the behavioural analysis. We explored three modified scenarios covering product placement, new products and point-of-sale material against the real-store evidence.

The model made the proposals tangible. Stakeholders could examine how an idea would work within a complete store, rather than assess an isolated concept on a slide.

What the work delivered

The programme produced a convenience-channel strategy, category-specific recommendations and a way to test alternative retail executions. It helped inform a Cocio listing, new Arla Starbucks drink formats and a yoghurt proposition. The relationship subsequently expanded into a broader shopper programme and segmentation.

For a business deciding where to invest in range, formats or retail execution, this is the kind of work that connects customer understanding to specific commercial choices.