Kroger has hired an outside advertiser to manage its marketing strategies, a for-the-first-time bold move recently made by the grocer in a bid to win over grocery shoppers in the United States.
The move is not the first but latest in a series of actions by the Kroger to lift up its image from a local shop to be a place where customers can shop more of the products than the items of their essential needs.
Founded at 66 East Pearl Street in Cincinnati, Ohio in 1883, Kroger, for the past two years, has been aiming to expand globally as well as technologically, and for that it advanced with several multi-direction moves like buying stake in British online supermarket Ocado and a meal kit firm Home Chef, joining hands with autonomous car company Nuro, launching of grocery delivery service Kroger shop and collaborations like with Walgreens in the United States and with Alibaba in China
Such big advancements, which are very different from the one company had made in the past, made the Kroger able to be first grocer to provide its customers with facilities like in-house meat departments and bakeries.
For many years, Kroger, despite to focus on business transformation, remained focused on spending to acquire competitors to expand in the infamously thin-margin grocery industry, and bought Fred Mayer in 1999 and Harris Teeter in 2014 to scale up.
But scale proved to fail to work as a single defense line in grocery industry which has faced robust changes during the past five years with number of shoppers who like their food fresh, natural and organic is increasing now.
Until now Kroger’s spending strategies are coming to be appearing with better results as it shares saw increase of 5 percent in last year, which valued the company at market capitalization of $23 billion, while its online sales surged by 60 percent in third quarter of 2018 whereas its profit dropped by 20 percent because of the heavy investments.
