Over the past several years Food Lion has changed their marketing strategy away from the cookie cutter stores that have primarily looked exactly the same as they have since the first store opened in 1957 in Salisbury, North Carolina1. The Food Lion name has been widely known throughout the southeastern United States, their plain stores were kept just that way to help keep prices low, an attribute that they drove home in their advertising campaign. Over time Food Lion’s message had become stale, they were being overrun by the low prices of competitors like Wal-Mart and they did not offer many of the products available at high-end retailers like Whole Foods Market Inc2. They need to find a new niche, as stated by Michael J. Haaf, senior vice president of sales, marketing and business strategy for Food Lion, “We were stuck in the middle. We didn’t really stand for anything, and that was a really untenable position.”3
Food lion had to change their product, they could not continue to compete with their existing line of stores. Food Lion spent three years studying its customers and created an internal research department to look at income levels and demographics, along with how customers shopped, what they bought and where they bought it. They conducted surveys, reviewed transaction histories and conducted focus group interviews4. From the results of these three years of analysis Food Lion has developed three different store models. The traditional Food Lion store is still the same with minor remodeling changes; this is their middle of the road store design. Their high-end store design is Bloom. The Bloom stores are in what the company calls Bloomburbs, populated by wealthy dual-income young families ...