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Comment by adamzerner | Hacker News Reader

Do you know this, or are you assuming this? It is certainly possible that, at the margin, someone is willing to spend money on a charity but not spend that same money on the product. Although I suppose there's probably a correlation between donating and willingness to pay more.

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It’s a way to test shoppers and evaluate their willingness to add a marginal dollar for spending. That can be correlated against buying behavior and taking advantage of discounts.

Right now, for a grocery store, that means they can put butter on sale that women will buy for Christmas cookie making, and market sprinkles and decorative sugar at higher prices (or with a coupon) to increase customer value. That MDA heart that you bought on Labor Day weekend helps assess the effectiveness of that sort of promotion.

I really like Trader Joe's that does not do all of this segmented pricing, sales, and coupons. I wonder if they can survive without all that in the long run. Maybe with having mostly store brands it will work out for them.

ALDI (the company behind Trader Joe’s) has been doing without ads, segmented pricing, or coupons for half a century and became one of Europe’s largest retailers.

I’m sure they’ll stay competitive in the future.

In their German home turf they started a huge ad campaign last year (their first ever except for a weekly newspaper ad) and even started to discount some of their regular product lines. Maybe the days they could survive without all that are over?

ALDI Süd has, yeah, but afaik ALDI Nord only launched some ad campaigns in the past days, right?

And from what I know, that’s less about survival, and more that they can’t expand horizontally anymore, and the new owners (the Albrechts both died in the past years) also want to expand vertically into other market segments.

They both started about a year ago with a huge budget for ads online, on TV, on radio, on billboards, and in cinemas. They haven’t really talked about their decision (they never do). They lost a lot of market share to other supermarkets and especially to the heavily-advertising Lidl. Surely the new managers played an important role in that decision. In other countries they always advertised.

I know they’ve experimented for a while, but I don’t think Nord launched a major ad campaign until recently.

Supermarktblog documents these changes quite well, IMO.

https://www.supermarktblog.com/2017/10/02/aldi-nord-in-renov...

The Aldi Nord campaign launched last year. I remember because I'm amazed by the campaign's bad typography whenever I see one of the posters in a shop.

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