Kum & Go Gets More Personal With C-Store Shoppers

Things are getting ever more personal in retail, and the Kum & Go convenience store chain on Wednesday provided another example of that digital trend. The retailer will use Florida-based shopper intelligence technology provider Catalina to fashion precise marketing messages for shoppers — messages based on shopping history and consumer behavior.

The announcement comes as convenience store operators and other retailers seek to reach consumers via multiple channels — especially mobile — and earn their attention and loyalty via personalized offers, rewards and ads. Such outreach to shoppers is based, in Catalina’s case, on “more than 11 billion shopper trips annually, providing relevant ad messages and offers to consumers with purchase-based targeting” according to the Wednesday announcement. “In the process it measures the impact of media tied to actual in-store sales that correlate to ad exposures, thereby reducing ad waste.”

Personalization Wave

Kum & Go is a family-owned retailer that operates some 400 locations in 11 Midwestern states. It is cozying up to Catalina and its digital tools at a time when, according to a recent Retail Leader column, “personalization is the new loyalty.”  As that column notes, recent research has found that 73% of retailers in the U.S. and four other Western countries view personalization “as a top-three marketing initiative. They view it as contributing to their financial performance, now (72%) and in the future (86%).”

For convenience stores specifically, many operators are working to refashion product offerings to appeal to younger consumers who tend to desire higher-quality food and other items than has been commonly associated with many such locations. Store operators also are beefing up their mobile rewards and loyalty programs. Shoppers, too, increasingly expect personalized engagements with retailers of all types, a trend that has been fueled in large part by Amazon and other e-commerce operators over the last decade, but which now applies to various other merchants.

“With all of today's retail choices, it becomes increasingly critical for us to attract and create meaningful, personalized engagement with all our shoppers, today's and those of tomorrow,” said Stuart Taylor, vice president of business insights and analytics for Kum & Go.  “We are excited about the ability to deliver precise, personal interaction among our rewards customers, and now beyond, helping them connect with the products, healthy choices and brands we know they will like based on their prior purchases.”

Catalina, via its Wednesday announcement, provided further evidence of the growing popularity of personalization in the convenience store space. The company said that earlier in 2020, it “forged a partnership with Koupon Media, the leading promotion solution in small format retail, to provide C-store retailers and CPGs with a more holistic understanding of cross-channel consumer purchase behaviors.”