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Recently, the Tinderbox crew headed out into the field to investigate and identify top trends on our own home turf in Seattle. For a glimpse into how these Play Dates can help companies “reimagine” new opportunities, come along for the ride in this week's special Tinderbox video post as we explore leading edge trends at the world famous Pike Place Market.

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Tinderbox on Tesco’s Fresh & Easy Neighborhood Market: How fresh? Does easy matter?
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(1.35MB) February 2008

One of the fundamental misunderstandings regarding globalization in the contemporary era is the mistaken belief that you can easily export your successful brand or business model to foreign lands and expect similar successes. Despite the apparent attractiveness or initial interest in your product, service or retail format, native peoples exhibit a powerful, innate desire to do things their way — a desire which will always win out in the end. We call this desire “culture” and, like Texas, you had best not try to “mess with it.”

The missionaries who worked hard at spreading the gospel to native islanders in the South Pacific found these truths out the hard way. Though the indigenous peoples generally greeted missionaries — and their mystical artifacts — with interest and awe, transgressions were handled by custom and tradition. In other words, when certain native peoples had had enough of the pushy religious types, they simply cut them into pieces and ate them. Really, it’s true.¹

Though today’s executive teams do not have to worry so much about beheading or cannibalism (at least not in this culture), they have nonetheless experienced a remarkably similar set of missteps and failures as they have attempted to expand globally². To wit, Wal-Mart has experienced significant failures in several international locales (most notably Germany and South Korea)³ after mis-estimating in the intractable nature of local custom and sentiment.

This tension — between the executive team’s desire for streamlined global expansion and the native people’s intractability when it comes to “different ways of doing” — is at the heart of Tesco’s current challenges as they attempt to export its brand of shopping in the form of their Fresh & Easy Neighborhood Market to U.S. shores.

In early 2008, a few months after unveiling their new concept stores, we devoted two weeks to careful study and analysis of Tesco’s Fresh & Easy Neighborhood Market stores in the San Diego and Phoenix markets. As part of this process we engaged in repeated site visits to five Fresh & Easy locations in these two cities⁴. To get the most accurate sense of how consumers are responding to Fresh & Easy Neighborhood Market, we visited each retail location during multiple “day parts” and engaged in retail ethnography, which included extended conversations with consumers.

While it is far too early to predict a win or a loss here, our overall conclusion is that if Tesco’s Fresh & Easy Neighborhood Market is to survive in marketplaces across America, it must overcome significant challenges. Never mind the generalized set of challenges all retailers face such as retail distribution and execution, but fundamentally, we would question whether or not Tesco has taken into consideration what happens when “fresh” goes the way of “natural” in the minds of consumers.

Eight mile high challenges:
“It’s not so fresh, it is easy, but does easy matter?”

We believe that the most fundamental challenges facing Fresh & Easy Neighborhood Market lie somewhere near the heart of their business model. While the value proposition is clearly and powerfully articulated in the brand name (Fresh & Easy), only one-half of the proposition is truly relevant to contemporary consumers: the “fresh” part.

If you spend any amount of time at a Fresh & Easy Neighborhood Market interacting with the obsessively friendly team members, you quickly notice that they, too, are not unlike zealous missionaries. When not trying to help you (which they do with relentless vigor), they are constantly reminding you of how “easy” their retail format is and in doing so insinuate that most other food retail experiences must somehow be “difficult” or “inconvenient.”

While employees’ evangelizing the company’s line on “easy” is understandable, the larger issue is whether Tesco realizes that consumers have never suggested food shopping to be a difficult or inconvenient task. What consumers tell us instead is that shopping for food these days is rarely desirable, enjoyable or entertaining. In our most recent ethnographic work, we listened as consumers described their mainstream grocery shopping experiences with language akin to that used to describe visits to the DMV or the post office. For most, grocery shopping is a real drag, not because it is difficult or challenging, but because it just isn’t much fun.

Likewise, the perception that consumers are craving convenience is simply overstated. True, consumers always whine about how busy they perceive themselves to be, and they always champion the idea of “one stop shopping” in focus groups. But mind you, these are the same consumers that willingly spend 35 minutes strolling around their local specialty food retailer simply because they enjoy the experience and are looking to be inspired. Yes, they are busy; at least they think they are. Consumers address this issue by looking to omit tasks they loathe, not by economizing on what they have traditionally enjoyed.

In short, Tesco appears to be making one of the hallmark mistakes of the contemporary branding epoch: they are focused on solving problems rather than offering opportunities. Moreover, they appear to be solving for a problem that doesn’t really exist among the natives. In this they are not unlike the above-mentioned fabled missionaries attempting to spread the gospel to peoples which were, in truth, pretty happy to begin with.

On a more pragmatic level, Fresh & Easy thus far faces numerous challenges when it comes to executing on the fresh proposition. To note but a few:

• every single fruit and vegetable is pre-wrapped in plastic,
• there is no evidence of food being prepared on premises,
• there is a paucity of truly “ready to eat” food options available, and
• there are no customer-staff interactions in fresh and prepared foods⁵

Yes, consumers are all about “fresh,” but there is a heck of a lot of competition around “fresh” these days. As it stands now, Fresh & Easy will require considerable tweaking to drive this proposition successfully and compete effectively with the panoply of fresh options which abound. Simply put, Fresh & Easy doesn’t execute on “fresh” very well — yet.

All told then, our “eight mile high” conclusion is that Fresh & Easy isn’t so fresh, either from a product level or retail experience perspective. And while it is easy, we must wonder…does “easy” really matter?

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