People are generally proud to do business with their grocery store, even though they say the overall experience is only fair.

However, Los Angeles-area-based Trader Joe’s ranked among the best-performing grocery stores in the country.

The ExperienceBuilt Brand Index, from Atlanta-based MMR LIVE Experience Design, asked a nationally representative sample of 2,785 people to describe their interactions with leading brands in five industries to identify how those brands delivered against MMR LIVE’s Eight Principles of Experience Design - The LIVE 8.

Grounded in research, the LIVE 8 helps orchestrate experience improvements for businesses. They emerged from LIVE’s exploration into the hallmarks of organizations that create relevant, lasting and best-in-class relationships.

“People often view their grocery experience as transactional, and while they rate restaurants higher, the grocery industry has more ‘Brand Beacons’ than the financial and telecom sectors,” MMR LIVE Founder and COO Patricia Houston said. “However, the COVID-19 pandemic has shown many organizations, including grocery stores, can deliver a new type of customer experience, whether it’s online ordering or curbside pickup to make it easier for shoppers, particularly those who are most vulnerable.

“By deliberately applying ExperienceBuilt design principles to their operations and how they engage with their audiences, business owners can prepare for the ‘future normal,’” Houston added. “This is the time to learn from leading ExperienceBuilt brands, create new plans and processes, and even test new ideas.”

Overall, the best-performing grocery stores are:

• Trader Joe’s
• H-E-B
• Wegmans Food Markets
• Harris Teeter
• Publix

“The most successful brands in the Index know an experience doesn’t just happen; it’s designed to create the perfect moment,” Houston added. “Their consistency in execution builds trust, and leads to stronger emotional connections with their audiences.

“Brands must forge emotional connections with their audiences to deliver an exceptional experience people want and will return to,” Houston said. “People value experience as much as a product or an offering itself. Brands have an opportunity to provide value in a way that sometimes feels intangible, but it elicits an emotional response from customers.”

ExperienceBuilt™ Business Consulting

MMR LIVE conducted the survey as it launches its new ExperienceBuilt business consulting practice.

“We’ve worked with leading brands to refine their approach to incorporating user feedback into service and experience development, a discipline that will take on new resonance moving forward,” Houston said. “But, our goal is not to stop at actionable recommendations, we want to go further by creating and executing feedback-driven action plans.

“Launching a consultancy formalizes our core competencies as it’s a service we’ve been delivering with increasing frequency,” Houston said. “It’s a natural evolution of our solutions offering, and it answers a need in the marketplace by leveraging the existing experience on our team.”

For more information, visit mmr.live.

About MMR LIVE Experience Design

MMR LIVE Experience Design is a consultancy-styled group of diverse minded researchers, storytelling strategists, data analysts and experiential marketers. We help businesses become more valuable to the people who care about them. We specialize in interdisciplinary experience design, helping build long-term brand loyalty for organizations that embrace change. For more information, visit mmr.live.