Seoul's supermakets

After analysing restaurants, public transportation, touristic spots and universities we are going to take a look at supermarkets established in the city of Seoul.

The 4 main supermarkets present in the city are: Lotte Mart, E-Mart, HomePlus and Costco.

Supermarkets mostly affect foreigners living in Seoul for a long period as tourists generally don’t go grocery shopping and go eat in restaurants. Nevertheless, it remains an important place for everyday day life. Besides consumption is considered as a strong cultural element. According to the authors Martyn J. Lee and Grant McCracken: “Culture is recognized as a general influence on consumption; it is constituted and expressed in the consumption of countless products and services.” (Peñaloza, L. & Gilly, M.C., 1999).

After reading the article of Lisa Peñazola and Martin C. Gilly, “Marketer acculturation: the changer and the changed”, I decided that would be considered, for this analysis, the following elements: opening hours, methods of payment, names of the supermarkets, signs and display, sales support service as well as websites and information lines.

Opening hours:

Opening hours are wide, some supermarkets are open 24 hours a day while most of them are open from 10:00 am till midnight. A few of them are closed on Sunday (usually 2 Sundays a month).

Websites & Information lines:

The information lines offered by the four main supermarket chains present in Seoul are all available in English, Chinese and Japanese. (Korea Be Inspired, 2012).

Both E-Mart and Lotte Mart’s websites are also available in those three languages (other than Korean), but HomePlus’ one doesn’t seem to offer that possibility. On its side, Costco’s website is only available in Korean and English.

Names:

As you can see on the logos below, Supermarkets in Korea all possess an English name written with the Roman alphabet. Those names are easy to pronounce for Korean and English speakers.

Signs and display:

Overhanging shelves full of products, signs informing about promotions and products have a strong presence in supermarkets. In Seoul, most of them are written in Korean but numbers and percentages written using Arabic numerical system can be understood by everyone.

Some basic words such as: open, close, on, off, event, sale, etc. are sometimes used and written in English. I would, however, consider this phenomenon as linked to the fact that some English words are becoming more and more part of the informal language in some countries rather than to the willingness of supermarkets to adapt to foreigners.

The customer service and tax free service desks are usually indicated in English and sometimes in Chinese and Japanese.

Methods of payment:

As in most stores in the World, supermarkets in Seoul accept cash (only Korean Won) and credit cards. Nevertheless, some credit card types such as Visa may not be accepted in every shop.

Of course those supermarkets are part of famous chains that are quite well implemented in Korea. Seoul possesses a few stores and online services whose targets are foreigners. For example, High Street market is a shop located in Itaewon (district of Seoul popular for its high concentration of foreign residents) that offers imported Western goods. Products available are mainly from the US, Canada and the UK as most of their packaging are in English. The staff speaks English and sometimes others languages. The shop owns a website entirely written in English.

In the same thought, the website Fatbag is an Internet superstore for foreigners in Korea. It also sells imported Western products and even IKEA items. The website offers a certain amount of products coming from North American countries, Latin America, Europe, South Africa and Asia; the widest choice of products being those coming from North America. Payment can be made via credit card (Visa, MasterCard, American Express) or Paypal, WireTransfer, etc.

The website is available in English and prices of products can even been shown in dollar (instead of Won).

Those real and online stores are really useful for foreigners that are having trouble getting used to Korean food. Unfortunately, physical stores are spread enough the city for everybody to have one next to home and some people do not feel comfortable shopping online.

As we had noticed through this analysis, supermarkets are making some effort to attract foreigners in their stores thanks to their website, information line and wide opening hours but once in the store foreigners to face Korean signs and products. Indeed for people that can’t read Korean and unfamiliar with Asian products, it takes a little time strolling through shelves recognising and trying to guess what products are.

Of course supermarkets have the same objective than any other business: be profitable. To make money, the number one marketing rule is: identify your customers and adapt your products/services to your target. Supermarkets’ main target being people that live nearby their shop, most of those individuals in the South Korean capital are usually locals; which is why few adaptation to foreigners has been noticed.

References:

Lee, M. J. 1993. Consumer culture reborn: the cultural politics of consumption.

Korea Be Inspired. 2012. Travel highlights.

Retrieved from: http://english.visitkorea.or.kr/enu/SI/SI_EN_3_6.jsp?cid=682553

McCracken, G. 1988. Culture and consumption: new approaches to the symbolic character of consumer goods and activities.

Peñaloza, L. & Gilly, M. C. Journal of Marketing, July 1999. Marketer acculturation: The changer and the changed.