Shopper Digest: Festive Frenzy vs. Evergreen Excellence

It is common for festive-driven categories to leverage festive seasons in Malaysia to drive growth. However, the key defining factor that differentiates a market leader from a challenger is often evident during non-festive periods. This difference is particularly apparent in the example shown below:

For this category, the share of the market was mainly taken up by Brand A and B (over 60%). Despite having a similar size of shopper base, Brand B’s volume share is 3 times larger compared to brand A. As we drill deeper to understand the phenomenon, we found out that Brand B retains shoppers even after the festive season much better than Brand A which enables Brand B to be the market leader within this category. 

Brand B successfully positions itself as the brand that people consume not only during the festive season but also during normal days. But, what exactly Brand B did to achieve this? The key to its success is that Brand B has a wider range of SKUs (9), and in fact it has 3 times more SKUs compared to Brand A (3). The wider range of selection enables shoppers to have more options to choose from as they use it for different occasions, especially during the non-festive season, sustaining their volume even after the festive season. Furthermore, Brand B offers a bigger pack size to encourage regular consumption where is around 50% larger compared to Brand A, for their large pack. This is vital, especially during the current era with inflation deemed as the major spending inhabitant for consumers, some consumers may opt for a larger pack size as it is more value for money.

Based on the case study given above, perhaps festive-driven category brands need to re-look at the category from a different angle where retaining shoppers during the non-festive period is equally important as recruiting shoppers. On a side note, for market challengers, instead of shadowing the market leader during the festive season, the perhaps non-festive period could hold more potential in gaining market share.

Penetration of a brand is the proportion of the population that picks up a certain brand over a given timeframe. In order to determine whether your brand is going, its key to understand among WHO is your penetration growing or declining, as well as WHERE, and how it changes over time. Equipped with this knowledge, better strategies can be constructed to continuously grow a brand. Worldpanel offers the tracking of this measure among many others on a consistent 4-weekly basis to help clients with their business needs.