Baby Food vs. Beer

Late Thursday night, my wife, Shirre and I were shopping at Wal-Mart for groceries for the upcoming week. We bought milk, butter, you know the usual grocery store list. While in the drink aisle she called my attention to the beer shelf, where someone had left several jars of Beech-Nut Baby Food--right next to bottles of Moosehead Lager and LandShark Lager. That brought to mind the beer and diapers illustration which I learned marketing class then later in database development class in college. This bit of marketing/IT explains how preferred customer card or customer loyalty programs really work to identify what products should be placed together, etc.

Customer loyalty programs data mine tons of shopper purchases listed on receipts and in doing so discovered from that different things people buy together at the store including pairings like peanut butter, jelly, and bread, chips and salsa, milk and cereal, beer and diapers, etc. That's why whenever you shop at your local grocery store often you may receive a receipt following your purchase along with a coupon printed at the register. These coupons are not randomly generated, but instead printed based on the items that you bought. Stores are also likely to put certain items on sale or place others in certain parts of the store to attract the shopper's attention.

Now the first few pairings I mentioned may be no-brainers, but here's the explanation for the beer and diapers pairing. Young college age (20-30-something) males are known for drinking copious amounts of beer along with a bachelor lifestlye. Men in this age range who get married or father children tend not to have the time to go out and drink as they did while unattached. Therefore when they go to the store, they may buy beer, but are also likely to buy diapers for the baby. Based on this information, you can now often find beer pretty close to the baby diapers section at most grocery stores. And now you know...the rest of the story.