Asia Article: Ready, Steady, Shop! Vol. 4

Winning in low-volume growth environments

For the past year, rising prices have fuelled the value growth of many FMCG categories. Meanwhile, underlying volumes have often taken a hit as shoppers have responded to inflation by dropping categories entirely or by buying them less often or in smaller pack sizes.

However, as inflation cools the value growth of FMCG is going to decelerate, and ultimately stagnate, unless volume growth returns. In Ready, Steady, Shop! Volume 3 we saw how Indonesia’s inflation was cooling off towards the end of 2022 and here we see the same trend emerging in the Philippines as we move into 2023. The time to act is now!

So how do brands (and categories and retailers…) generate volume growth? Three words:

Penetration Is King.

It is a well-known fact that the brands with the highest penetration will capture the largest share of category volume. Therefore, achieving volume growth is inextricably linked to finding and attracting more shoppers. In fact, 90% of brands that grow volume did so via increasing their annual penetration level.

In the current climate of low volume growth whoever understands what drives penetration for their brand and also where their next group of buyers is, will gain the competitive advantage to thrive once price inflation-led growth comes to an end.

Shopper Magnet from Kantar has been designed specifically for this purpose, leveraging our continuous shopper behaviour data to understand each brand’s “penetration magnetism” in two ways:

1. Past drivers of penetration change: Quantifying the factors that most influence shoppers entering and leaving your brand.

2. Future sources of penetration growth: Uncover current penetration ceiling of your brand and identify “white space” opportunities for your portfolio.