German Retail Blog Podcasts

Ugly Mr Covid has hit few business areas within our publishing company, dfv Media Group, harder than our Conference Group division. Another prominent victim of the pandemic was the annual Insights Congress of our market research & marketing magazine, planung&analyse, this autumn.But never underestimate the resilience of the female species. Sabine Hedewig-Mohr, managing editor of planung&analyse, and Diana Goldbeck, MD of dfv Conference Group, have created a virtual platform for international exhibitions that will appeal to marketers from all trades. The first such cyber venue, under the name Data Analytics & Insights Salon (DAIS), will be held on March 24 & 25 next year. Want to know more?

At the end of this tedious coronavirus year, let's have a look around the global village and see how the world's retailers are celebrating Christmas. All you need to do is click the link embedded in each company name and watch the commercial they have designed to promote sales during the festive season. If the birth of Christ was re-enacted today, one wonders how biblical figures would manage to celebrate a Covid Christmas. Perhaps the shepherds would only be allowed to view the babe in the crib if they took a fever test and wore protective masks. Or, would Joseph and Mary hold virtual tours of the stable on Zoom?Not a Christian and don't celebrate Christmas? Don't worry, no one's perfect. Hopefully, we also have many Moslems, Jews, Hindus, Buddhists and agnostics among our international subscribers. These readers can still enjoy the creativity and humour that retail marketing departments and advertising agencies have employed in a relentless assault on customer pockets...

For better or for worse, everyone knows Amazon. But Alibaba? China's leading e-commerce player is still relatively unknown in the West. For many consumers the name probably still conjures up 40 thieves rather than an online retailer with global ambitions.Our readers, of course, know that Alibaba is a digital giant and a bit like Amazon, PayPal and Twitter all rolled into one. The Hangzhou-based company founded by legendary entrepreneur Jack Ma in 1999 is also growing like a supernova. According to Edge Retail Analysis, it still ranks only number 22 among Europe's top retailers by sales, but these jumped 24.5 per cent last year, outpacing even Amazon.The corporate boilerplate is certainly ambitious: "Our mission is to make it easy to do business anywhere. We aim to build the future infrastructure of commerce. We envision that our customers will meet, work and live at Alibaba, and that it will be a company that lasts at least 102 years."Why, though, 102 years and not 91 or 203 years? Perhaps Alibaba president Mike Evans will enlighten us...

If you hang our latest Top 50 ranking table of European retailers on your office wall, it will doubtless impress all trade visitors. But what are sales and market share prognoses for 2020 without interpretation?Even the most cursory glance at this fascinating snapshot, compiled by Edge Retail Insight, demands an answer to a number of questions.Why, for instance, does the largest retailer on the continent still make hardly more than one per cent of its annual sales online when Amazon is already snapping at its heels? Or why are there still no retailers from Central & Eastern Europe in the Top 10 – thirty years after the collapse of the Soviet bloc?

Since February retailers and fmcg manufacturers have been challenged as never before in peacetime. They have risen to the coronavirus threat with feats of organisation and radical changes to their logistics.On the front line, store employees tread warily. Admin staff are now familiar with working from home. Some ask why they once commuted to the office every day. Even top managers question the vast carbon footprint they make by jetting around the globe when a videoconference would often do just as well.Lockdown, home office and furlough have accelerated structural change in the trade. As customers order more online, home delivery is becoming mainstream. Fear of infection has taken what little joy there ever was in shopping at mass retailers. A wave of small business closures has already begun to stoke unemployment and recessionary concerns. At all events, the feel-good factor is totally lacking among consumers.Anyone can draw a doomsday scenario, but ways out of the crisis are what really matters. So we asked a panel of international trade experts to find them...

Price has always been an essential marketing mechanism in retailing. It is obviously now of paramount importance when consumers are worried about losing their jobs in a post-Covid recession.On a recent shopping trip to Italy, it was therefore not surprising to find grocers like Interspar or Coop Italia proclaiming how they have frozen their prices. They do this everywhere on store banners, shelf stoppers, and price tags. They don't even spare their organic food departments. This is great for customers, but is it really good for retailer margins? After all, only one player can be the cheapest in the same way that only one gunslinger could ever be the fastest in the Wild West. Or are we really in some Italo-Western where all that matters is to be the last man standing?In the pursuit of an answer there is little point in talking with a discounter whose whole raison d'être is price. But what about a full-assortment grocer like Spar Österreich, Austria's leading retailer by sales, with more than 570 hypermarkets and supermarkets in northern Italy?This is a grocer, who has always been about quality, and therefore with a reputation to lose. So we asked country manager Paul Klotz how dangerous he thinks it is for Spar Österreich to play the price game in bella Italia...

A good doctor regularly takes the pulse of his or her patients. The same applies to publishing. One can bore the pants off of one's readers simply by not covering the issues that concern them.This is a fatal mistake in a world where it takes just one click to unsubscribe from an online newsletter. But there is a simple journalistic remedy: Ask your own readers.As you belong to the elite group of individualists who subscribe to German Retail Blog, we are keen to discover more about your motivation as a reader.We should therefore really appreciate your answer to the following questions:

Martial comparisons are generally best avoided. But, as in wartime, the coronavirus has brought out the best and the worst in people. We have had to endure black marketers selling protective masks and even basic foodstuffs at exorbitant prices, unprovoked attacks on vulnerable shop staff, and disinformation from the White House.Yet the crisis has also brought forth many unsung heroes. Selfless hospital staff serve their fellowman to the point of exhaustion. Others have volunteered to be human guinea-pigs in the search for a vaccine. Simple, hard-working people with their own families to care for have still found the time to shop for the old. Meanwhile the young are generally as feckless as they have ever been since time immemorial. They persist in 'hanging out' unmasked at super-spreader events. Marketers and sociologists have long tried to define them with such terms as Generation Y, Generation Z or The Millennials. Perhaps we should simply call them the Covid-19 Generation.The young would not perhaps be so bright and gay if they inhabited a world of rationing with long queues for such basic commodities as pasta, water, milk or toilet paper. The fact that they don't is due to the tremendous speed and flexibility with which suppliers have met unprecedented spikes in demand...

May we draw your attention to the English version of one of our most influential and authoritative sister publications? FOOD SERVICE International provides global news for the HoReCa sector, which is intimately linked with retailing and the fmcg industry.For decades shopping centres, hypermarkets and department stores have profited from the customer frequency created by such illustrious names as McDonalds, KFC, Pizza Hut or Taco Bell. Attempts by retailers to go it alone have come to one conclusion: Gastronomy has to be done extraordinarily well with the flair of an Eataly if it is to create enough pull. Executed poorly or even only half-heartedly, the whole thing backfires.Top brands have also not been able to resist the sheer marketing power of food service concepts. Examples range from PepsiCo's former massive flirtation with fast food to Dr. Oetker, who intends to launch a first 'Pudu-Pudu' pudding shop in Venice Beach/California.Interested in this vibrant business segment which has been challenged as never before in the time of corona? Then check out FOOD SERVICE International, it's just a click away...

Dear Retailers,If you want to survive a savage post-Covid-19 recession, you will have to change your shabby old customer marketing ways. True, the era of mass retailing has always been an excuse for poor and surly service, but the times they are a-changin'.Just look around. Before, you couldn't pack enough customers into your stores, and you kept them in for as long as possible. Now, in the time of coronavirus and the Great Lockdown, you drastically limit their entry and push 'em out as quickly as you can...

Rohlik.cz is already the leading home delivery company for food in its native Czech Republic. The online start-up now intends to honk its horn in Germany within the next three to five years. "It's my primary objective," says CEO and co-founder Tomáš Čupr.Rohlik has just kick-started international expansion in neighbouring Hungary and will press the ignition button in both Vienna and Bucharest later this year. Čupr sees both range selection and delivery speed as the company's USP, especially when competing with bricks & mortar retailers who try to run online shops.Rohlik is currently active in nine Czech cities where it can deliver within a timeframe of just two hours. Even in distant Budapest, where international retail giants like Tesco, Auchan or Spar deliver the next day, the pure player says it can get the job done in three hours.It's one thing to be quick, but it's a completely different thing to be both fast and profitable. So how do these Czechs make their dough?

Nietzsche considered it an infallible sign of decadence when art makes art its subject. So this strange German philosopher would probably not approve of any blog talking about itself, albeit for the first time since its creation ten years ago.Although praise of one's employers always sounds hoaky, it is to their credit that this blog has never been subjected to rigorous cost analysis. Clearly, our publishers see it as one of many facets within the manufactory of LZnet, the online arm of our weekly B2B newspaper Lebensmittel Zeitung.The reverse side of this generosity of spirit is the non-existence of any budget (importunate SEO advisers please take note).But employees are not obliged to whinge and whine when corporate cost controllers do not choose to wine and dine. Instead even German journalists, who must keep their hands unsullied by filthy lucre as per strict local press law, may take up the search for a payment model as a challenge worthy of the online entrepreneur...

In only days from now Aldi will be starting business in the People's Republic of China. The German discount giant's first store will open in Shanghai on June 7. According to information obtained by Lebensmittel Zeitung, a further nine outlets will follow there soon. The first two sites, one of which includes a tenancy in the Jingan Sports & Fitness Center, are in noticeably prosperous neighbourhoods.Although Aldi is said to want to proceed cautiously during the pilot phase, our newspaper expects the medium-term store count to reach 50 to 100 in order to obtain the necessary economies of scale. Persons who claim to be familiar with the concept describe it as "more modern than company stores in Europe".Under the slogan 'Everyday value – Handpicked for you', the global discount pioneer will be offering a considerably more up-market proposition than at any of its other foreign markets. The convenience-oriented assortment will apparently feature many import goods from Europe, including the dairy products and cosmetics much loved by Chinese consumers.This represents a major departure from long-established company practice.

If this were football, Schwarz Group would be FC Barcelona, Real Madrid or ManUnited. The owner of German discounters Lidl and Kaufland has again won the European retail cup, as compiled by Frankfurt-based analyst platform LZ Retailytics, with whopping annual gross sales of €113bn in 2018.French giant Carrefour is still runner-up, but has continued to lose ground to Aldi. UK grocer Tesco, supercharged by the purchase of leading local wholesaler Booker, stays number four.German supermarket giants Edeka and Rewe thrive in fifth viz. sixth place. With the exception of Metro, whose sales were burdened by currency rates in Mother Russia, all eight German players in the Top 50 league have continued to grow, with five of them among the Top 10.In an industry that has become, for better or worse, a game of large numbers, this isn't particularly remarkable. Germany is, after all, the biggest market in western Europe. So were there no surprises in all this sexy trade data?

It used to be fun being one of the boss men, but not if you work at Schwarz Group these days. Klaus Gehrig, the powerful figure running the German retail giant founded by secretive entrepreneur Dieter Schwarz, seems to revel in home-made creative disruption. In increasingly frequent purges the 70-year-old corporate veteran regularly gives his top brass the chop, regardless of their sales achievements. No one is sacrosanct and no one is spared, if they question the general partner's structural changes...

Talk about audacity! Russian discounter Torgservis plans to enter Germany via Berlin-based subsidiary TS Markt. The retailer from Krasnoyarsk in Siberia wants to rent "more than 100" stores with sales areas of 800m² to 1,200m² and 30 to 40 parking spaces. Expansion is planned in both Northern and Eastern Germany, including Berlin and the federal states of Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, Saxony, Saxony-Anhalt, Thuringia, and Brandenburg.TS Markt is already advertising online for Category and Business Development Managers on its German website ts-markt.de.At first blush this looks very much like carrying coals to Newcastle. After all, Germany is the international home of discounting. You can find discount stores on any local High Street, trade research company LZ Retailytics counts nearly 16,100 of them. Working on the basis that "Poor people must save, and rich ones like to", powerful giants such as Aldi and Lidl have carried their no-frills, low-price message with invariable success to nearly 50 countries world-wide over the last 60-odd years.So have the Russians gone suicidal or mad? Or do they know something we don't know?

Life is not easy when you are in the business of selling data. You obviously need to market your assiduously collated material or you won't make any money. But, if you publish it for free, everyone will take it, use it and, who knows, even sell it on. Therefore it was generous of retail data analyst platform LZ Retailytics to allow German Retail Blog to publish an exclusive excerpt from their new European Grocery Retail Ranking 2017.The team of nine renowned analysts at Frankfurt-based LZ Retailytics has also let this blog have an exclusive look at the full ranking table for the purposes of commentary. So what do the figures reveal to the critical eye?

Under the marketing slogan "una nuova idea di spesa!" (a new shopping idea), Aldi Süd (Aldi South) revealed its plans for the conquest of the Italian market today.After two years of planning via its Austrian arm, Hofer, the retail giant will open ten outlets on March 1 in five northern Italian regions.The stores, with sales surfaces of 1,000² to 1,400², will be in Bagnolo Mella, Cantù, Castellanza, Curno, Peschiera del Garda, Piacenza, Rovereto, San Donà die Piave, Spilimbergo and Trento. All will be served by the company's first DC in Oppeano, near head office in Verona.Germany's most profitable discounter has ambitious plans for national coverage and intends to open "more than 45 outlets" as well as nearly double staff headcount from 880 to 1,500 by the end of the year. On its website Aldi Italia is looking to open stores in all eight regions of northern Italy as well as in Tuscany.This is a fine start. But isn't Aldi coming a little late to the party?

It's intriguing. Klaus Gehrig, the Big Boss of parent company Schwarz Group, has indicated to the German media that Lidl is facing strong headwinds in America.The discount giant is working "flat out" to modify the store concept it launched in Virginia last June. Sales surfaces are to be reduced from around 2,000m² to 1,400m² and expansion slowed. Lidl's US stores are also likely to more strongly reflect the solid discount virtues which have led to success in 30-odd European countries.All this would be perfectly normal for a Plc that has already invested an estimated €2bn in a land where many top international retailers have come a cropper. It would be called giving guidance to shareholders. But Lidl is a privately-run company. So why has Herr Gehrig sounded the alarm bell?