Pulmuone: Leveraging Walmart Luminate Charter for joint business planning
Digging deeper into shopper behaviors
Pulmuone, a maker of natural foods like tofu and dairy- and meat-free alternatives, wanted to identify their Walmart customers and dig deeper into their shopping behaviors. They worked side by side with their Merchant to utilize the full suite of Walmart Luminate Charter products to gain these insights and chart a course towards strategic growth.
They began with big-picture questions to help shape their category strategy and direction:
- Who are the customers that shop in the vegetarian section in Walmart’s produce category?
- How do these customers interact with the category and the rest of the store?
- Are there differences between category customers in-store vs. online (OPD)?
- Where else are the customers shopping and why are they shopping in other stores?
- How do we provide better solutions and better meet
these customers’ needs?
A more complete view
Pulmuone reached across all Walmart Luminate products to gather the data and insights they needed. Through the Performance in Detail report in Shopper Behavior, Pulmuone learned the customer penetration rate for the category was double for OPD vs in store. They also discovered vegetarian category customers at Walmart skewed to mid-range and up-market in price sensitivity. The Cross Shop report revealed two distinct groups of shoppers in the category—plant based and Asian foods—and the Basket report for sub-categories confirmed this.
Other key takeaways:
- There were more customers in Asian foods than plant based, though spend in plant based was nearly triple that of Asian foods
- These category customers have a significantly higher basket size than the average customer—over $100
The two newly identified groups of shoppers were both surveyed through Customer Perception. Their feedback told Pulmuone:
- Over 70% of households purchasing plant-based products regularly consume both vegetarian and animal products; less than 12% were plant-based only
- 60% of plant-based households shop at other grocery stores
- Almost 90% of plant-based customers purchase dairy at Walmart; less than 46% purchase meat
- 55% of Asian food customers also purchase takeout from Asian food restaurants
Next came Channel Performance. This data helped Pulmuone focus on the channels their customers purchased in. In addition to accessing core sales metrics, they were able to examine OPD volume overall and by item, plus examine pick rates.
Results at the ready
The insights reaped from Walmart Luminate will help enable Pulmuone and their Merchant to make customer-centric decisions and ask better questions around category direction to:
Close the gap in category penetration vs ROM
Collaboratively take advantage of the higher customer count for Asian products within the category
Locate growth opportunities and discover what segments are stable or down overall
Explore opportunities for the category in OPD
Pulmuone can also better collaborate and plan with their Merchant to make data-driven decisions with strategic growth in mind:
- Future Line Reviews can now focus on addressing gaps in assortment that most significantly impact category penetration vs. ROM
- Increase Walmart Connect activations to target items with current high OPD penetration rates and newer items with below-average OPD penetration
- Identify opportunities for innovation and new items within the category
- Delve deeper into how the two shopper groups interact to maximize volume opportunities
Explore the Pulmuone case study to see how Walmart Luminate Charter helped provide a path forward to strategic growth.
References:
Proprietary First-Party Data, Walmart Luminate 2023
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