SymphonyIRI's Times & Trends highlights new developments and critical events across all major CPG categories and channels, providing powerful benchmarking data to help guide your strategic decisions. This report provides insights into loyalty trends and drivers of those trends, detailing opportunities to ensure that your key categories and brands remain on the “essentials” list, make it into the shopping cart, and translate to sales and share growth.
Introduction
The golden ring. Everyone on the carousel is striving to get that ring, but only a lucky few will succeed.
In the CPG world, brand loyalty is very similar to that golden ring. All CPG marketers are striving to capture the loyalty of shoppers, but attaining–then holding on to–that loyalty is very difficult, and only a few will succeed. With brand loyalty, though, it is not luck that brings success. It is skill in understanding consumer needs and determination in precise communication that your product will deliver on those needs.
During the past couple of years, the task of establishing and maintaining brand loyalty has become even more difficult. The economic downturn is not over. Recent news indicates that the recovery will be even more trying than initially thought.
Indeed the battle to establish and maintain brand loyalty will remain quite arduous. More important, though, is establishing and maintaining the type of loyalty that translates to purchase behavior even in tight financial times: the loyalty that delivers against the bottom line.
Select Findings
A weak economic environment and inflationary pricing trends are feeding consumers’ propensity to experiment with brands outside their “normal” consideration set in some categories, having a negative impact on brand loyalty. Nonetheless, brand loyalty has increased in 45 of the top 100 CPG categories during the past three years, supported heavily by new product innovation.
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More than one in three consumers actively seek out private label CPG options in an effort to save money. And, today, a majority of consumers consider private label products to be of equal or better quality versus name brand alternatives. As such, private label is placing considerable pressure on brand loyalty across some categories, particularly low-differentiation categories.
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