Senior Vice President & CMO, GROCERY OUTLET HLDNG CORP
Fireside Chat: Grocery Outlet's Social Strategy Goes Local
As Grocery Outlet showed during the pandemic of 2020, a firm social strategy for retailers can be used quickly to empower the ...
About Layla Kasha
Layla Kasha, Senior Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer at Grocery Outlet, has discussed the company's marketing strategy in several recent appearances. She described the retailer's model as a "beautiful marriage of entrepreneurial spirit and the backing of a corporate brand," noting that its independently owned stores allow operators to tailor their offerings and community partnerships to local needs. Kasha stated that the company's marketing focuses on the people behind the business rather than just products, and that its decentralized social media strategy, which empowers store owners to post content, proved advantageous during the pandemic by enabling real-time communication with customers. Kasha has also spoken about her career experiences and the role of women in leadership. In a 2018 TEDx talk, she said that "every single break in my career has come from a man" and cited a 2011 UCLA study that found women often preferred male bosses. She described what she called the "queen bee syndrome" as a "career-killing phenomenon" and advocated for women to support one another professionally, stating, "Be the girl boss you wish you would have had." More recently, she credited women, including her boss Pam Burke, for her success and emphasized the importance of failing forward and taking risks.
Transcript (28 segments)
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Steve0:00
But now to round out the formal part of the program, I want to bring on someone I've spoken to before, Layla Kasha, the CMO of Grocery Outlet. When we spoke earlier, she showed me something they were doing that worked exceptionally well, and I wondered why everyone wasn't doing it. It's about how she's built and leveraged her social network. Grocery Outlet is a network of independently owned and operated value grocers. Layla has been at Coldstone Creamery, Sprouts, and Save Mart, but it's really at Grocery Outlet where she built a social media infrastructure to drive retail engagement in real time at a local level. Layla, how are you? Where do we find you today?
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Layla Kasha0:56
I'm great, Steve. Thanks for having me. I am in Modesto, California.
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Steve1:00
Oh, you're right now? What's going on down in Texas and up here in the Northeast? Tell us what's the temperature. Let me guess.
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Layla Kasha1:12
75 and sunny. We're getting a little bit of weather like everyone else. It's been on the chilly side. I'm actually looking it up right now: it's 60, 67 degrees. So we are not complaining here in Modesto, California.
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Steve1:29
Well, give us a thumbnail of what Grocery Outlet is, especially the business model, because that impacts your marketing challenges.
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Layla Kasha1:44
Absolutely. We are the nation's leading extreme value retailer. We sell items found in local grocery stores at deep discounts. 50% of our product is opportunistic, bought via closeout due to package changes, forecast errors, innovation challenges, short coding, and cancelled orders. Half the stuff in our building is bought at a great deal, so you'll see it once and never again. That means we can deliver deep value. We sell through a network of independently owned grocery stores, each with one owner per location, highly tied to the community. That gives us a local advantage but also unique challenges in supply chain and marketing. We don't have schematics or planograms; it's a unique shopping experience defined by serendipity.
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Steve3:55
Yeah, that's a new idea. So why does a grocery chain need a social strategy, and I know you're particularly heavy on Facebook. Tell us about both the strategy and why you chose that channel.
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Layla Kasha4:15
I think you need a strategy for a digital life. Our shopper lives a digital life across social media, apps, connected TV, streaming radio. The best place to tell a unique story is social media, and Facebook allows us to capture attention for about three minutes, telling very specific stories in a unique way. It's a content play where people are, and I want to go where people are.
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Steve5:26
Tell us about how you advise your independent owners. What does that feed look like? Is it promotional, informational, discounts, conversational CRM? What do you tell them to do to optimize this?
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Layla Kasha5:53
We have enterprise marketing at corporate and local store marketing. We lay the foundation with a main Facebook page and deliver content, but they all have their own pages. This paid off during the pandemic because they could be unique and independent. We give them best practices and they lean into what their community responds to. Some talk about community partners, food banks, etc. We provide a menu of things they can do, and they choose what fits their community. It's about giving them their own voice.
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Steve8:04
That raises a couple of questions. What sort of training are you giving them, since they come from different levels of familiarity with social platforms?
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Layla Kasha8:24
It takes a lot. Our aspiring operators come in knowing nothing about marketing. They know inventory, schedules, stacking shelves, but not marketing. The benefit of social media is they understand it from their personal life. We have classroom training, training stores, ongoing workshops, webinars. We're not just doing marketing; we're teaching marketing. This keeps us on top of new trends.
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Steve9:51
They're not marketers; they don't know metrics. How do they gauge the effectiveness of what they're doing on social platforms?
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Layla Kasha10:06
Great question. At the corporate level, we look at engagement. Operators ask if they're getting bang for their buck. We use Facebook's store trips tracking to see if someone looked at an ad and then visited the store. Sometimes price and item posts drive foot traffic, but often local stories, partnerships, school programs resonate more. People want to do business with people, not logos.
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Steve11:25
I want to show some clips where you really hit this out of the park. You were set up for success when the pandemic hit because everything was highly localized. Let's roll those clips.
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Josh12:08
Self-cleaning toilet paper, folks! Coming at you live from Grocery Outlet Easton. We've got toilet paper coming in right now. I hear it's magical, maybe self-cleaning. Come on down, we've got plenty. Have a great day.
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Eric Lichtschwager12:24
There's been a lot in the press about interruptions in the fresh meat supply chain. One thing that keeps us different from big box stores is we are pretty agile in sourcing from different suppliers. We can generally source similar product at a similar price point to keep good supply and variety. Our fresh manager, Pei Ling, is one of the top performers; through her efforts, our fresh meat department is fully stocked.
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Jason13:09
Hey good morning everybody. It's Friday the 24th, absolutely beautiful outside. I wanted to let you know our trucks are running late today. Our grocery truck won't be here until around noon. So don't rush down expecting toilet paper or paper towels. As soon as the truck gets here, I'll do another Facebook live to let you know.
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Steve14:06
I'm still blown away by that. The last guy there is one of your superstars, right? That's Jason. He was bringing people into the aisles and showing what was in stock.
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Layla Kasha14:23
Yes. When the pandemic hit, everyone was panicked. We immediately got on a call with the operators and told them this was their chance to stand up in their community with a direct connection in real time. They all leaned in differently. Jason went live every day at 8 AM, taking live questions about what he had and didn't have. He didn't want people to waste their time. That was viewed as real value in the community. It was really well received.
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Steve16:12
How are you proliferating best practices? Were you running into issues with warnings about what not to do? How did you share among owners in real time?
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Layla Kasha16:58
We have a real-time community app that looks like Facebook where we share information. We also have an intranet, daily calls initially, then weekly, now monthly. I would give the top five ideas and results. We did have to call operators who posted without masks before masks were mandated, telling them to be careful. But most did nothing wrong. Everyone was doing something different that made sense for them.
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Steve18:48
It's interesting that you were communicating with them the same way they communicate with customers. Is this sustainable? Are you going to continue with it?
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Layla Kasha19:15
We were doing this before the pandemic; it just put it on steroids. This has been our go-to-market strategy at the local level and will continue. We're getting better at it. The pandemic helped us learn quickly — fail fast, fail often. Authenticity is huge. Not all operators are comfortable on camera, so we encourage them to find someone who is. Being genuine is a game changer.
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Steve20:55
What were your biggest challenges in executing all of this, including building the social infrastructure and maintaining it?
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Layla Kasha21:06
For the pandemic, the pace of information change was hard to keep up with. In general, getting buy-in from executives who don't understand social media is difficult. They think it's something their kids do, not a real strategy. Marketing is the only job everyone thinks they know how to do. It's a blend of art and science. Getting them to get out of the way and let me put it in place — I told them to give it six months. And it works.
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Steve22:46
Layla, thank you so much. This was a treat.
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Layla Kasha22:48
Thank you for having me. I love this program. I appreciate everyone's time.