Superior – Kathy Ongarato offered a smile with each sample of Italian soda recently at Wild Oats Market.
She was warm, cheerful, persistent. But despite her chatty salesmanship, one flavor had detractors.
The raspberry was getting, well, raspberries.
It “tastes kind of like cough syrup,” groused customer Vicki Washburn, 56.
Even before Washburn’s complaint, Ongarato got an earful from two other patrons. Not everyone agreed: Some tasters liked the raspberry-flavored sparkling juice. But the bad word of mouth persisted.
Ongarato, a Wild Oats demonstration clerk in Superior, privately confided that the comments wouldn’t “fall on deaf ears.” The manufacturer’s representatives would hear of the product’s perceived shortcomings.
How?
She would tell them.
A big part of Ongarato’s job is to dispense free products, on which U.S. companies spent $1.8 billion in 2004, according to PromoWorks, a Schaumburg, Ill., firm that conducts in-store sampling for retailers.
Customers who receive samples are more likely to buy goods, a number of surveys show. And businesses that liberally hand out freebies are rewarded with repeat business.
But another part of her job – and the jobs of tens of thousands of clerks throughout the country – is to dispense customer feedback to the product makers.
Often, the feedback is positive. Sometimes, as in the case of the raspberry-flavored juice, it’s not.
The collection and dissemination of this feedback, which ranges from informal to detailed, is a process customers generally don’t know about. But Wild Oats patrons said it makes sense.
“I didn’t know they actually listen to that, but it’s kind of good,” said Washburn’s son, Peter.
Quick and reliable product feedback is one reason retailers and manufacturers are placing a renewed emphasis on sampling.
The practice has been around as long as commerce. But in-store sampling became prominent in food retailing in the 1970s and 1980s, said Todd Hultquist, a spokesman for the Food Marketing Institute, a Washington-based trade group.
Grocers say sampling brings more people into their stores and encourages them to spend more money.
“Retailers want to make shopping more fun, and everybody likes to be able to go into the store and be able to nosh along the way,” Hultquist said.
A case in point: Jane Litsey, a 19-year-old student at the University of Colorado at Boulder.
“I’m not going to lie to you; I come here for the samples,” she said while shopping at the Wild Oats in Superior.
Seventy percent of shoppers are more likely to frequent grocers that offer lots of samples. Eighty-seven percent would purchase a slightly more expensive product they had tried over a cheaper one they hadn’t. The statistics are from a survey released this year by sampling firms Mass Connections Inc. and The Polling Co.
Sampling also has become the most popular way to get a customer to try a new product, the survey showed. Sampling has surpassed coupons, advertising, even word of mouth.
“In the past, advertising was a big piece of the marketing pie, and promotion was a very small piece,” said Andy Potter, vice president of marketing and business development for Promote It International, a Lakewood company that coordinates sampling in health clubs. “As mass marketing becomes less effective, that is beginning to even out.”
Grocers are beefing up their sampling programs.
Safeway Inc. and King Soopers, a division of giant Kroger Co., recently expanded their programs, generally by adding more products and more sampling hours.
“We’re trying to provide more customer interactions with a broader variety of products,” said Safeway spokesman Jeff Stroh. “You’re going to see a great many demos in multiple departments during peak hours.”
Boulder-based Wild Oats, the No. 2 U.S. natural-foods grocer, will soon bring chefs into its stores to demonstrate recipes that incorporate multiple products.
While it may seem simple enough to set up a card table and hand out some cheese cubes, retailers and manufacturers put a lot of thought into the sampling process.
Lately, grocers have used sampling to build allegiance for exclusive store brands, which are more profitable than name brands.
To test the effects of sampling programs, Wild Oats staffers typically count the products on the shelves before the start of a sampling session, then recount at the end of their shifts.
Sales of products sampled in its stores increased as much as 300 percent, the company has found – and tended to linger for several days beyond the sampling period.
When they’re not handing out store-brand products or doing other informal demos, samplers often do demos on behalf of manufacturers who provide the products and pay for a time slot.
During those demos, Wild Oats staff are required to submit counts of the sampled products, the comments customers made and how much was sold during the sampling program.
Other grocers handle their programs differently. King Soopers, for example, treats most of its demos informally – except in the case of store brands.
When those products are sampled, customers are asked to compare the store’s offering to a national-brand counterpart. The demonstrator is then required to keep track of the feedback and note which is coming out on top.
King Soopers outsources its sampling duties, which helps keep costs down, spokesman Trail Daugherty said.
A lot of retailers prefer to use outside staff because they are more knowledgable about the industry and the product being sampled, survey data indicate.
Others, including Safeway and Wild Oats, keep the job in-house. At Wild Oats, each store must have at least one demo coordinator, and store directors may hire others as the need arises.
Manufacturers also are taking sampling to the streets, the gym or wherever they’re likely to find customers.
Ice-cream maker Ben & Jerry’s recently hosted a free-cone day at its retail locations, giving away more than 1 million scoops nationwide and prompting customers to line up outside its stores.
As with grocers, some manufacturers use their own staff to handle smaller-scale sampling events; others will turn to third parties.
One such company, Promote It, recently completed two weeks of sampling for Clif Bar Inc.’s newly launched Builder’s Bars at gyms in Denver; Portland, Ore.; San Francisco; Seattle; Los Angeles; and Boston.
The 15-year-old Lakewood company has made a business out of coordinating product sampling programs in gyms.
Promote It has seen its business increase an average of 30 percent in each of the past several years, Potter said. Its clients have included Procter & Gamble, ConAgra, Unilever and Johnson & Johnson.
But competition in the sampling industry is heating up as more companies get into the outside sampling business, Potter said.
“It’s a very lucrative and growing industry, but it’s also becoming increasingly competitive,” he said.
Promote It’s health-club sampling programs can cost from $10,000 for limited sampling of a small product to $500,000 for a far-reaching program involving a heavier product. The fee also includes follow-up research so manufacturers can assess effectiveness.
During its promotions, the company hosts drawings to sign up customers who have sampled the product. Later, staffers call back to see whether they’ve bought any of the product they’ve sampled. That information is then relayed to the manufacturers.
Promote It touts health-club-specific sampling events as a way of targeting young, upscale and health-conscious customers who are more apt to purchase certain products. But others favor in-store sampling because it reaches customers when they are just yards away from the checkstand – and already opening their wallets.
That’s where Wild Oats sampler Ongarato comes in.
During her recent shift, nearly half the customers she talked to walked away with either Italian soda or raisins – another sample product – in their baskets.
When they didn’t, that was OK, too.
“You never know,” the Wild Oats demonstration clerk said. “They might come back later or remember it on their next trip.”
Staff writer Kristi Arellano can be reached at 303-820-1902 or karellano@denverpost.com.
