Blueprint for Brand Growth establishes a framework for marketing prioritisation

London & Sydney: 15 May 2024: Kantar, the world’s leading marketing data and analytics company, today introduces the Blueprint for Brand Growth, an analysis of more than 6.5 billion global attitudinal and shopper data points from the past decade. The year-long exploration reveals empirically the key drivers of brand growth and provides a decision-making framework for marketers to better control the levers of growth that shape their brand future.

The Blueprint is the result of collaboration between Kantar’s experts, industry leaders and advanced analytics work combining Kantar’s unique BrandZ and Worldpanel data assets. All focused on one question ‘How can marketers better drive growth?’. It proves that brands grow through being meaningfully different to more people. Brands that are meaningfully different to more people command 5X market penetration today and have a real advantage in penetration growth over the next two years.*

To achieve meaningful difference, the three Growth Accelerators and decision-making frameworks Kantar recommends marketers activate are:

• Predispose More People: Creativity, advertising and experience builds meaningful difference as well as mental availability for your brand. When optimally executed, this drives 9X higher volume share, 2X higher average selling price, and a 4X likelihood of growing share in the future.
• Be More Present: Optimising distribution, customer journey, range, pack, pricing and promotions wins 7X more buyers vs those present in only half of buying occasions.
• Find New Space: Innovation focused on identifying incremental spaces (motivations, occasions, tangential categories and services) doubles a brand’s chance of growth. Increasing the number of usage occasions by 10% results in revenue growth of +17%.

The Blueprint builds upon and enhances existing industry research on how brands grow. It importantly proves that while market penetration growth is crucial, solely focusing on this is insufficient to holistically drive sustainable brand, revenue and margin growth. Kantar’s analysis underscores the role of differentiation – not just distinctiveness – in forging strong mental connections between consumers and brands as well as defending pricing power.

On introducing Blueprint for Brand Growth, Jane Ostler, Kantar’s EVP of Thought Leadership and Blueprint project lead, commented: “Our Blueprint for Brand Growth sets a new standard for strategic marketing understanding and excellence. Every marketing leader can use this framework to evaluate their brand’s own competitive positioning and then shape their strategic response and marketing investment priorities.”

“Our newly revealed Growth Accelerators will, instinctively, feel familiar to CMOs. They are now, though, underpinned with new quantifiable evidence of their impact on brand and revenue growth. These are universal truths that every brand can use to focus their strategy and secure the budget for their highest impact activities. “

Tony Costella, Global Consumer & Markets Insights Director at Heineken commented: “At Heineken, we’ve been working with Kantar on the brand guidance system and looking at meaningful differentiation for a number of years now. This has helped us understand exactly how we can drive growth on our brands.”

“A brand like Heineken is at a very different stage in different markets worldwide, so using the Meaningful Different and Salient Framework, we’ve been able to really get underneath the drivers of meaningful differentiation to understand and connect with certain consumer groups that deliver brand growth across different markets.”

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