IndustryCPG
Lapsed and light buyers explain why they moved from your brand to a rival or to private label, market by market, so the brand walks into the category review knowing what would bring them back.
Buyers who drift away still stand at the same fixture every week, and they can say which pack, price or promise now wins their hand there.
Include three groups: buyers who stopped purchasing the brand in the past year, light buyers who now buy it only on deal, and shoppers who moved to the retailer's private label. Each drifted for a different reason.
Run one study across the brand's priority markets at once, so the category team can see whether private label is winning on price in one country and on perceived quality in another.
Write the category review's question before fieldwork: whether to cut the range, change a pack size or defend price per use. Every interview then stays on the choice the retailer will ask the brand to make.
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GrowwEach reason for drifting points to a different lever, and the category review goes better when the brand arrives knowing which lever its lapsed buyers would respond to.
Buyers go back over the most recent trip where they passed the brand by, what they picked up instead and what was on their mind, and the category manager reads each conversation in full, transcript beside recording, before choosing which reasons to take to the retailer.
Write down the changes lapsed buyers ask for, a larger format, a refill, a claim about the ingredient they now look for, and set them against the price cut the brand was about to offer.
Ask private-label buyers what the retailer's product does better in their eyes, whether that is price per wash, a pack that looks like the brand's, or being on the shelf the week the brand was out of stock.
Understand how people notice, interpret, evaluate and choose a product based on its packaging.
A brand rarely loses a buyer in one store. Penetration and loyalty data show the drift: fewer purchases a year, more of them on promotion, more of the category going to private label. Switching research asks buyers who drifted what changed, and it pays to hear lapsed buyers and private-label buyers separately, because they left for different reasons. Usage and attitude research maps how the category fits into the household week. Price research tests price per use and pack-size ladders against private-label alternatives. When private label copies a brand's colors and shape, the pack itself becomes part of the problem, and packaging research tests whether regular buyers can still pick out the brand, read its benefits and tell it apart from the retailer's version.
Light buyers who now pick the brand up only on promotion shape next year's trade-spend plan. A screener admits shoppers whose recent purchases of it were all on deal, so trade marketing hears whether a shallower discount would still keep them.
Some drift starts in a year the brand stopped advertising. The moderator asks each lapsed buyer when they last remember seeing it on screen or in store, and the brand manager can set their answers against the media calendar.
A pack that loses a few grams at an unchanged price is meant to go unnoticed. Revenue management can search every lapsed buyer's transcript for the smaller pack, raised before anyone asked about it, and hear whether those buyers counted the downsizing as a price rise.