Shopper Digest: Triple the Benchmark in Just a Year?

It’s hard enough to launch a brand completely fresh, let alone in a category with giants monopolising not just the market shares, but also the shopper’s top-of-mind! More often than not, some brands enter markets and fail to penetrate the masses, while others have an explosive spurt upon entry, but end up losing momentum and fizzling out after time. Not this one though; we’ll take a look at how one brand managed to go up against the veteran players in an already saturated market.

Today we’ll be looking at a category, with the aforementioned brand as a recent entrant and has been turning heads with its rapid expansion over the last couple of years. We see its progression over time. Within the span of a year after it hit our shores, Brand X reached a household penetration of 7.2%. At this point, that may not mean too much to you, but we have to see how it stacks up against our standardised new product launch benchmark of 2% penetration within a year, and Brand X hit more than triple that value!

Admittedly, the brand still had some way to go as it only commanded about 2% of the market value share, but they managed to sustain the trajectory over the rest of 2023, now obtaining 5% of the market share, and is reaching 19.5% of the households. Now, how did Brand X manage to gain so many shoppers over a relatively short period? One of the things that worked for them was to cater to their target market. We can clearly see that the main shoppers Brand X managed to recruit were Low to Mid-Income Malays. By choosing the right target audience and customising their communications, Brand X was able to carve their way in and build their reputation in our country.

Adding on to that, Brand X was over-indexed in promotions compared to the category during their first year. With the bulk of their promotions coming from discounts, this lowered their average price to only 90% of the market average. Harking back to their main shoppers, this definitely contributed to their growth as their shopper base grew consistently up to Q3’23, opting for this fresh and new (and more importantly, cheaper) alternative. While other market players also increased promotions compared to the previous year, many shoppers were still picking up the underdog, Brand X. In fact, some brands had increased promotions but did not translate to an overall growth of the said brand.

At the end of the day, Brand X maintained their growth, with shoppers continuing to stay with them, showing that their success was not just a matter of promotions and targeting, but also of the consistency of the products. Now with a steady base, Brand X is growing steadily across channels as it invests more to reach more households.

In order to grow a brand, the first step is to build a steady and loyal base. As our own saying goes, ‘Penetration is King’. The further you can reach out, the more accessible you become, and the more likely your brand is to be picked up. By knowing who is actually picking up a brand, you can work on how to get it to the shoppers and what sort of communications/promotions catch their eyes. Identifying the target market, what worked for you and what’s holding you back could help in determining a brand’s success.

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, it's key to understand among WHOM your penetration is 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.