Week 4 Part A: Defining Target Markets

 

For this week’s post, I will be taking a deep dive into the websites of a couple natural foods grocery stores, and further comparing and contrasting their websites, website design, and potential target markets.  The first store, Sprouts, is a popular chain store with many locations (400+), across the Unites States and found locally in Carlsbad, Vista, and San Marcos.  The second store, Cream of the Crop, is a much smaller local store with just one location in Oceanside on the Pacific Coast Highway. I have shopped at Sprouts grocery stores in the past, so I have a pretty good idea of their food items, however, I have never visited their website before today. The smaller local store, Cream of the Crop, I have never shopped at before, but I have driven by it on more than a few occasions so I was excited to check out their website to see what I might have been missing.

Sprouts, as expected, has a website that is very informative, well laid out and easy to navigate, and is aesthetically pleasing with light natural colors as you would expect a natural food store to have in keeping with its healthy branding.  In reference to my blog last week, the Sprouts website is very well C.R.A.P.H.T.E.D (Concept & Contrast, Alignment, Proximity, Repetition, Hierarchy, Typography, Ease of Use, and Depth of Content).  I was pleasantly surprised at how well the website was organized for easy shopping, either online, pickup, or for creating my own grocery list to shop with in person.  Weekly specials and digital coupons were easy to locate and all item prices and nutritional info were easily found.  Customer reviews and ratings were also available for every single item.  However, I found that the most fascinating aspect of the website was the ability to navigate either by category (meats, dairy, bulk, produce, etc) or by diet type (organic, gluten-free, plant based, keto, paleo, and non-gmo).

So, in terms of targeted marketing, Sprouts has brilliantly laid out the ability to target a variety of natural foods shoppers based upon their diet habits if so desired.  If I just want to shop for gluten free items, I just click on the filter, and I immediately see all of the gluten free items available, which can then be further filtered down to find just what I might be looking for.  The impression I get as a customer of Sprouts is that they are empowering me as the consumer to make my own choices, to quickly find or browse the types of food I want, and then have it delivered in a way that is most convenient for me. If I was a tourist visiting this area, and wanted to buy groceries quickly and smartly, Sprouts has certainly made the experience, and especially their website, a pleasant experience.

Conversely, and in almost every aspect, the Cream of the Crop website is simply horrible. I understand that they are a single local store and may not have a big budget or extra time for website production, but the website is almost completely useless and, in many ways, counterproductive to encouraging new customers. Maybe with the exception of seeing what types of sandwiches they make in house and learning about stores hours, this website leaves the customer disappointed and frustrated…. definitely not well C.R.A.P.H.T.E.D.   The home page, when it first pulls up, seems pleasant enough with natural white, green, and orange colors, but it falls apart from that point on.  The homepage has just one food item listed, organic turkeys (no prices listed), so I immediately get the impression that this website hasn’t been managed since last Thanksgiving.  If it wasn’t for the picture of a produce aisle on their homepage, I might not even suspect that this is a grocery store.  The navigation is awful…just a few places to click for their deli sandwiches and local products, the first of which leads to a dead-end navigation page (navigation bars disappear).  The local products are just a handful of random pictures, all of which have no prices or any nutritional information at all. The only prices to be found on the website are for their deli sandwiches and smoothies, absolutely nothing about the actual groceries that they carry in the store. The website did list some of their social media socials, with their biggest tag to Instagram.  Their Instagram account was just about as uninformative, with just a smattering of random photos.  Their Yelp account was also a bit counterproductive for their business, showing poorly made sandwiches (one with a hair), partially filled smoothie cups, and references to way over-priced items.  

As a targeted audience, the only customers that the Cream of the Crop website might seem to appeal to are those looking for a healthy sandwich or smoothie and those in immediate need of groceries that just happen to be very close by.  I imagine that this store might appeal to locals, but as a local, I found the website and its available information far from appealing.  The overall tone and message I get from this website as a potential customer is take a chance if you have some time to waste, hopefully they are okay, and buyer beware.  I undoubtedly am being a bit overly critical of a single location grocery store and their ability to develop and maintain a website (especially after first visiting the Sprouts website), and I left the website feeling disappointed, frustrated, and even a bit angry.  My suggestion on the website would be to either fix it or take it down altogether.  

Overall, I don’t think I need to spend too much time summarizing the compare and contrast of these two websites that I haven't already addressed.  From the customer’s perspective, they are different in just about every way…one good and one not so good.  In terms of defining a target market, I think Spouts has done an excellent job in reaching their potential customers.  Enough said, I will be back.  Conversely, I am not quite sure who the target audience is for Cream of the Crop, other than maybe simply for those that happen to be passing by.  Albeit, after this assignment, I am curious as to what the Cream of the Crop actually does carry in terms of produce and products, so I do intend to stop next time I drive by. Hopefully, my in-store experience at Cream of the Crop will not be the same as my online browsing experience.