Discount Vouchers Drive Loyalty To Service Station

The Nielsen Company
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News Release

Fuel Discount Vouchers Drive Loyalty To Service Stations,
Not Necessarily Supermarkets

Auckland, March 2, 2007: Despite all the investment, hype and promotion surrounding fuel discount vouchers, recent ACNielsen research reveals that fuel vouchers may be having little impact on growing loyalty towards supermarkets, but instead, may actually drive loyalty towards service stations.

“While it’s early days, what was meant to be a unique proposition to consumers has turned out to be little more than a hygiene factor,” commented Mr Michael Walton, Director, Retailer Services, ACNielsen. “With every supermarket offering discounts on fuel, it’s no longer a competitive advantage and and in fact, this ACNielsen study shows they are having more impact on the petrol pump than on supermarket choice”.

Voucher use has a much stronger impact on people’s choice of service station than supermarket, the ACNielsen survey revealed. 71 percent of people who used fuel discount vouchers every time they purchased fuel felt the use of vouchers had impacted their choice of service station, compared to 41 percent who said it had impacted their supermarket choice. This was also evident among those who had ever used a voucher, with 56 percent claiming it had influenced their service station choice compared to 35 percent for supermarket choice. (Chart 1)

“For supermarkets now looking to find differentiation, juicing up their offer with even more generous discounts seems the next step. There are already reports of local incentives of 20 cents a litre and more,” Mr Walton continued. “In any case it appears that the service stations linked with these programmes are the main beneficiaries.”
Fuel discount vouchers have very strong cut-through, with virtually all New Zealanders aware of the programme (92%), with most able to name individual supermarkets offering them. Surprisingly, and despite relatively smaller store numbers, almost one in two consumers nationally (46%) mentioned PAK’nSAVE as offering discount vouchers, higher than any other supermarket banner.

This perception may be driven by a number of facts: three in five New Zealand grocery shoppers regularly shop at PAK’nSAVE; they were first-to-market with their PNS Fuel launch forecourt offer a number of years ago; and PAK’nSAVE has an overall association as a ‘savings’ brand.

Regionally, awareness levels of supermarkets that offer fuel-docket offers vary. In Auckland Progressive’s Foodtown banner held top spot with three in five consumers (59%) naming the banner. In the Lower North Island Foodstuffs’ New World and PAK’nSAVE held attention (51% and 62% respectively) and in the South Island, New World (52%), Countdown (42%) and PAK’nSAVE (39%) shared the honours. (Chart 2)

The ACNielsen survey of 1,000 New Zealanders was conducted between 6 and 12 December 2006.

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