Australia’s supermarkets process millions of transactions every week. They are among the most powerful retail environments in the country, built on scale, consistency and consumer habit.
Walk into any major supermarket and you’ll find 20,000–30,000 SKUs spread across endless aisles, serving millions of shoppers each year. Yet despite this sophistication, one retail tool remains largely absent from the categories that drive grocery sales: Licensed products.
Outside of general merchandise adjacencies such as drink bottles, lunchboxes and seasonal promotions, licensing has little to no presence in the categories that define supermarket retail — snacks, dairy, beverages and pantry staples.
The assumption appears to be simple: grocery is functional.
- Milk is milk.
- Bread is bread.
- Cereal is cereal.
Over time, that thinking has evolved into a long-standing belief that licensing doesn’t belong in grocery. The reality is that this theory has never been meaningfully tested.
Supermarkets have been designed around efficiency. Consumers follow familiar paths, buy familiar products and repeat familiar behaviours. It is a system built on optimisation.
But optimisation also creates predictability.
And predictability removes surprise.
In modern retail, surprise is often what drives engagement.
Interestingly, supermarkets already understand this principle. ALDI’s Special Buys program is a perfect example. Through scarcity, themed ranges and urgency-driven execution, shoppers change their behaviour. They browse differently, purchase differently and engage differently.
Yet this same thinking rarely extends into everyday grocery categories.
At the same time, brand owners and licensors are facing increasing pressure. Retail channels are becoming more competitive, shelf space is tightening and traditional opportunities are becoming harder to secure.
Which raises an important question:
Why does one of the largest consumer platforms in Australia continue to operate almost entirely without one of retail’s most powerful engagement tools?
Licensing hasn’t failed in supermarkets. In reality, it has barely been applied.
Supermarkets have built one of the most efficient retail systems in the world. But in doing so, they have also created an environment that is highly functional, highly routine and increasingly predictable.
In a retail landscape where consumer attention is becoming harder to earn, that may be worth reconsidering.
The most important aisle in retail remains the most unchanged.
Written by Tony Bugg
This article also appeared in Edition 21 of The Toy Universe Magazine
