Q&A: What’s behind Wegmans’ Charlotte buzz?

The arrival of Wegmans in the Charlotte market has generated plenty of buzz, particularly among the region’s many transplants from the Northeast who are familiar with the grocery chain. What makes shoppers feel so connected to a retailer? Mason Jenkins, a clinical associate professor of marketing at UNC Charlotte, explains how brand awareness, emotional connections and nostalgia shape consumer behavior, why shoppers remain loyal to certain grocery stores and how retailers build excitement when entering a new market.

What is the difference between brand awareness, brand affinity and brand loyalty?
To some degree, these exist on a spectrum, with brand loyalty being the most desirable goal. Brand awareness needs to come first, however, for your name to be recognizable to consumers and for consumers to recall relevant information about you. Brand affinity is the emotional connection consumers have to brands. When it’s strong and positive, it can be leveraged into long-term, mutually profitable relationships, which are the basis of brand loyalty.

What makes someone loyal to a particular grocery store?
Some consumers are loyal to one grocery store, while other consumers would balk at the idea of being loyal to one store! How can they best save money that way? It’s all about what ultimately creates value for that consumer, and there will always be trade-offs. Higher product variety, quality and convenience often come with higher costs. Lower prices at a grocery store are the result of other trade-offs, such as a less convenient or accessible location or not carrying as many brand-name items. If someone is loyal to one particular grocery store, that retailer has created value for the customer’s shopping experience and made the customer OK with the inherent trade-offs involved.

How does a shopper’s personal history and nostalgia with a brand influence their purchasing decisions?
Family plays a major role in household grocery and product purchases. But family influence can be a double-edged sword. A child may go on to continue to purchase a beloved family brand of peanut butter or laundry detergent for decades after leaving home. Alternatively, negative memories of the household brand can lead an adult to avoid those brands once they begin shopping for themselves.

Why can the arrival of a familiar or highly anticipated retailer generate so much excitement in a new market, even before people have shopped there?
As humans, we have a fundamental drive to seek out explanations. Grocery shopping and refueling your car are some of the most routine retail experiences for consumers, yet the expansion of Wegmans and Buc-ee’s generates discussion with excitement and curiosity. A lot of that excitement comes because people know they won’t get a satisfactory answer about what is truly different until they experience these retailers for themselves.

Our area has a lot of transplants from the Northeast. Do companies consider migration patterns when choosing new markets to enter?
If a brand seeks to expand into new markets, it can more easily build brand recognition, affinity and loyalty if there is a base of consumers who already score high on those metrics. The grocery business operates on thin margins, and Wegmans minimizes risk by opening in a market where many customers may be missing that retailer and eager to share positive word-of-mouth recommendations from the beginning.

Written by: Mason Jenkins and Jason Vaughan