Upon the research we gained through our survey the average customer spends 15 minutes in GNC. With the average size of a GNC store is 1400 square feet this means that the average customer is looking through the store at an average of 100 square feet a minute.
The main thing to look at with that information would be the retail format and retail mix strategy. The retail format of GNC is that they have various types of products and place them in categories such as weight loss, extracts, vitamins, proteins and muscle building products.The way that GNC sets up their store is having the proteins/muscle building products in the back of the store and all the other products towards the front. The reason behind is would be that the proteins/muscle building products bring in the most traffic allowing the consumer to walk through the store past the other products that will catch their eye. GNC appears to set up their store using the “Model Stock Approach”. With GNC putting their best selling products towards the back of the store it allows them to focus on selling their other products.
GNC bases their arrangement of products to be individual of each other. By allowing this they are able to set up displays for each individual category of products, with the sole purpose of catching a persons eye as they walk past it. The displays inside of GNC’s are all Rack/Case displays. Their assortments of items placed in their category and by the multiple brands that they have. According to out survey it seems that consumers don’t seem to have a problem with the assortment of items. For every product, GNC has at multiple substitutes and many different brands with multiple prices.
Also, they offer different sizes of the same products. Another noticeable piece of information obtain from our survey is that price and product selection are the main factors in the deciding factor of a customers purchase. The external sources that effect the consumer is the salesperson and also the Ads that are inside the store. The consumer sees all prices and selection, which in essence affects the consumer’s final purchase.
Another external that affects the consumer’s final purchase would be a friend and also magazines such as “Health and Fitness”.They are full of reviews of all the different and new products in the market. Another consumer behavior that we observed from our survey is that the “GNC GoldCard”(rewards program) allows is effective. The response that we received was that it was free and also it was the best way to save money if you are a frequent customer. An interesting response that we received was that when the rewards are valid for a certain items, GNC raises the price on that item and the customer doesn’t save at all on the item.Not sure of how accurate this is but it seems that it has effected how one consumer shops.
Also, from our survey we found out that the average an individual buys 47 dollars worth of merchandise. At GNC the average product costs around 20-30 dollars. This means that the average customer is buying more then one product upon their visit. With this information GNC wants their consumers to run out of the individual products around the same time so they can repurchase the same exact products at the same time.
