How Fresh Market CMO Kevin Miller Boosts Consumer Conversions With Live Video Commerce

The Fresh Market has grown from reportedly “the worst company in America” to a $2 billion business with a decision-making flywheel and video commerce strategy that brings sales back into stores and integrates into the grocer’s retail media network. 

As a result, consumers now spend an average of five to six minutes on the company's video livestreams — a 35% increase in conversion rates compared to the Fresh Market’s site average. 

A CGT League of Leaders and Executive Council member, Kevin Miller, chief marketing officer of The Fresh Market, recently shared the company’s transformation journey, which he said hinges on a key concept: creating joyful moments for the customer both in-store and out. 

The League of Leaders is a cross-functional gathering of business and IT leaders in retail and consumer goods who meet quarterly to exchange ideas on a range of trends. Learn more about how to get involved.

To define what joy means to consumers, Miller said the Fresh Market team set out to replicate the feeling of returning to a full house of friends and family during the holidays. “You just feel like, man, I don’t want to leave this place.”

That vision has to do with building a great brand,” he said. “The brand is your promise. The brand is the most important value that you have as a company.”

In response, the grocer assembled a task force at the highest level — include a new CEO, CMO, and CFO — to innovate and develop a marketing strategy and products that would appeal to the consumer. 

Implementing a Live Video Commerce Strategy

In 2021, The Fresh Market partnered with with video commerce shopping platform Firework with the goal of developing email promotions that recreate the “Disneyworld-esque” feeling of anticipation and joy that customers feel when entering a store.

For its first initiative, the grocer rolled out a video campaign entitled “Home for the Holidays” that resulted in 30,000 minutes of customer viewing time. The company followed up with more videos, tacking on shoppable commerce capabilities and replacing static advertisements with streams.

“We got the viewership, we got the engagement rates, we got the click-through rates, so we decided to explore even more and kind of go all in and create on all our social and digital platforms, our emails, website,” Miller said. 

The results were immediately striking, he said, providing major upticks in customer engagement, conversion rates, and sales. By dotting shoppable videos into different consumer touchpoints, the grocer reached a different type of customer demographic — one that might not have engaged with The Fresh Market via the usual routes and channels. 

“Eighty percent of the customers had never visited our e-commerce site before. They were all new customers, and they were younger customers. They were the millennials and the Gen Z-ers — who don’t read their emails —- that we were looking for,” Miller shared. 

• More from the League: Clean, Centralized Data Breathes Life Into CPG and Retail Innovation — But IT Roadblocks Persist

In 2022, shoppable videos afforded the Fresh Market 4.4 million pageviews a month, 600,000 new followers on social media, and a call-to-action performance increase of 39%, versus an industry average of 2-7%. 

Steered by Miller, the company created over 800 new videos in 2022 “on everything, our daily deals, our monthly deals, our promotions, our new products, our grand openings — everything became a shoppable video. We found that we got over 130 million views of this content, and our customers now [at press time] have spent over 1,000 days’ time watching these videos.”