Company Blog

The Value Of Expertise

by Adam Zack — September 16, 2015

“Hello Haggen, Goodbye Hassle”

So I was tossing a baseball around with my brother and he threw it wildly over my head and broke a window. What to do? Of course, I called a plumber. Then I wanted to learn how to make fresh pasta, so I looked around online and signed up for a class on Mexican cooking. Then later I wanted some help with my fantasy football picks so I did some research and found the guy who was the best horse race handicapper in the state! Lucky me! This morning when I was cleaning up the mess the plumber made I fell and broke my finger. Luckily I was able to get an appointment later this afternoon with San Diego’s best proctologist, who I am sure will fix it right up.

So what the hell am I talking about? Well, bear with me a bit. With the grocery debacle that is Haggen now in Chapter 11 bankruptcy I wondered how they could fail so spectacularly and so quickly. (For those of you not familiar with Haggen, they were an 18 store Northwest grocery chain owned by an investment firm who agreed to purchase and rebrand 140 Safeway, Vons and Albertsons stores in the Pacific North and Southwest. The first stores were converted this past spring and the sales decline began almost immediately.) Of course the strategic, logistic and management decisions are largely to blame. They cite the “unprecedented” competition in the Southwest, but in reality the competition was already there and should have been anticipated. Southern California is an extremely competitive market. So my question was, did they align themselves with experts? Did they differentiate themselves at all? I remembered reading how they had hired a hot Los Angeles firm to do all their marketing and advertising, Haggen Hires L.A. Ad Agency . They are obviously some very creative people, but what was missing was the bridge from great creativity to practical grocery operations. Their tagline was “Hello Haggen, Goodbye Hassle”? What does that even mean to shoppers? They needed an expert in grocery marketing, not just marketing. We all know that grocery is a completely different beast than most other retail, and if you can’t relate the brand to shoppers so that they actually come through your doors, you’re sunk. It’s essential to know what actually works, not just looks super cool.

After all this typing, my broken finger really hurts. Better get to my proctologist appointment ASAP.