At last Consumer Connections 2016 conference, organised by IMRB, Josep Montserrat, Global CEO at Kantar Worldpanel and K Ramakrishnan, General Manager and Country Head – Household Panel at IMRB Kantar Worldpanel spoke with Anuka Roy about how the importance of penetration for a brand to succeed. Excerpts from the discussion:
About Brand Footprint and Penetration
Josep Montserrat (JM): Penetration is basically about how many people are buying your brand. The metric that we analyse here is how many interactions the consumer has with your brand, and how many times has your brand has been bought by a consumer. It is a matter of penetration: How many people and how often are they buying it? When we analyse that, we see the brands that have raised the number of times buyers have bought them. The top leaders, and the brands that have grown more in terms of consumer reach points, have done so because of increased penetration. Considering the size of the population that we are measuring, which is a billion households, one per cent penetration translates into 10 million people.
K Ramakrishnan (KR): The basis on which Brand Footprint works is Penetration. It looks at the population size you are trying to reach and the penetration the brand has — at least what percentage of them has had access to your product in the last year, and also how often they have used them. So, to that extent, there is no other ranking which tries to take these into account. They may take some other brand parameters into account, but this one specifically considers the extent to which a brand has penetrated a household. That becomes the biggest point on which it is based, and also the things that makes it different.
On Penetration as a yardstick
JM: I would say it is much more relevant in India than any other country because here, consumer backgrounds and hence choices, differ depending on geographies. What are the drivers and initiatives that you can put in place in India to win penetration, is different in other markets. Considering penetration of the products and the brand and the population can afford is a key driver for the success of the brand. There is an increasing trend of marketers to rate penetration as one of the key metrics in their scorecards in a way of measuring success in terms of the initiatives they have put in place and more we have clients at the local level and global level, that they put the penetrating and go to the CEOs to see the brand performance.
KR: Loyalty is important and penetration is important. But if you consider growth of brands, the brands that have grown, what have they improved on? Have they improved on penetration or have they improved on loyalty? At this point, it is clearly established that penetration is what is leading to growth. In that sense, there is really no clash. Therefore it is not a competition. The relevance in India for something like a Brand Footprint is very clear; the new measure or the new metric by which brands are getting assessed is actually penetration, which means the number of new customers they have, the extent to which you are able to reach. If that is the case, and if this is becoming a metric globally — and in India many brands are taking it on — then there is clearly no other metric which can tell them well enough about their standing, apart from Brand Footprint.
On Penetration and Mass Media Advertising
JM: There is no general rule to see how much mass media advertising has impacted penetration. Of course, we have services and solutions that allow the marketers to understand that by investing in advertising — either digital or offline — what is the effect in purchase behaviours. Not only in terms of sale, but also growth due to new people engagement by the brand, or an increase in buying frequency. Advertising is important because you need to be in the mind of the consumer.
KR: If anything, it has only added to it. Brand salience already exists because of the brand’s presence in media. Then the presence of these brands on the digital media. Third, the discussion about these brands on social media. If you add all these things together, it is only about building salience, in my view.
First appeared in dna of brands on July 18
