How the mults scaled back on deals and savings in 2017

Supermarkets scaled back promotional activity last year, latest data confirms, with both the number of promotions and average savings falling compared to 2016.

All the major mults reduced the number of featured space promotions in stores, with Sainsbury’s, Morrisons and Tesco making the most significant cuts [Promo Dynamic Retailers 2016 vs 2017].

Despite slashing deals by 12.7% compared with 2016, however, Sainsbury’s remained the biggest promoting supermarket, with 33,745 deals in stores. In contrast, the Co-op was the most consistent of the big supermarkets but also had the fewest offers, with 10,722 featured space promotions in 2017 compared with 10,735.

Most of the supermarkets continued to scale back on multibuys in particular, with x-for-y falling 0.9 percentage points to 19.8% of total deals in 2017.

“All of the major retailers but Waitrose cut the number of multibuys year on year,” says Assosia director Kay Staniland. “Morrisons, Sainsbury’s and Tesco also decreased single price point promotions.”

Waitrose offered 4,656 more x-for-y deals in 2017, with multibuys at 27.7% of its total deals, up 6.1 percentage points.

A further shift away from half-price deals and a reduction on the savings offered for single price point deals meant average % savings were down across the board, with the exception of Morrisons, where they remained flat at 32.8%.

The Co-op offered the best average saving of 33.9%, although that was down from 34.2% in 2016, while Sainsbury’s offered the lowest average saving of 27.7%, compared with 28.2% in 2016.

“Morrisons has increased average savings across 75% of categories, which contrasts strongly with the other retailers, all of which have decreased average savings for 50% or more categories,” says Staniland.

Impulse overtook BWS as the most promoted category of 2017, accounting for 23% of total activity compared with 18.6% for BWS. However, average savings on impulse promotions fell by 2.4 percentage points to 31.8%, with shoppers finding better savings on health, beauty & baby (35.9%), chilled dairy (34.7%), frozen (33.9%), household (33.8%) and grocery (32.7%).