Circle K Polar Pop

Accelerating store traffic to build every day sales Geo-coding residents vs. customers to drive every day sales.

CHALLENGE

A cornerstone of success for Circle K’s 6,500 store network is their cold dispensed beverages program. In the convenience store industry, this category not only drives foot traffic, but also represents 30% of total foodservice sales and 57% of gross margin. Increasing the sales of a segment boasting those statistics is imperative for Circle K and their proprietary beverage, the Polar Pop.

INSIGHT

Given the intense competition from other c-store retailers, we employed our proprietary Retail Geo-Zoning™ (RGZ) process to better understand the spatial patterns and relationships between individual Circle K stores, their customers and their competitors’ customers. Rooted in the sciences of demography, psychology and geography, our RGZ process helped us to identify and differentiate between customers who live near the store versus those who drive past it. By understanding these differences and the patterns of each group’s media consumption habits, we were able to develop specific media and messaging mixes designed to intercept them during key dayparts in order to optimize store traffic and sales.

RESULTS

The first market to execute this approach was Phoenix in 2016 and has since been rolled out to the remaining Circle K markets handled by Ott. Due in large part to the continual refinement and execution of the RGZ process, Circle K now sells 17 Polar Pops every second across their network.

Additionally, Circle K’s proprietary “Market Basket Reports” not only demonstrated an increase in the number of total number of Polar Pops sold by 27%, but also an increase in total sales by 10%.