According to World Panel, in any given year any brand has a 50/50 percent chance to grow or shrink. This is based on CRP (Consumer Reach Point) data they’ve gathered since 2012. This means that actual brand performance comes down to specific actions that influence CRP.
What is Consumer Reach Point?
It’s a compound metric used by World Panel . The describe is as a unique metric that ‘measures every instance a shopper chooses a brand. It combines two critical dimension: how many households choose it (penetration) and how often they chose it (frequency).’
Formula: No. of households in a market(population) x % of households buying the brand (penetration) x No. of interactions in a year (frequency)
Source: Brand Footprint 2025
It costs to grow penetration. It costs even more to regain losses in penetration.
The simplest predictor of future brand performance is recent history. Look at your penetration trend over the past 2-3 years. Growth breeds growth. Strong distribution, awareness, and buying habits compound. Decline, conversely, creates a self-reinforcing downward spiral.
Understanding why requires grasping two fundamental realities of brand dynamics. First, no brand is immune to customer churn. You lose a portion of your customer base every year. Second, you must continuously acquire net new customers to offset this loss before driving incremental growth. Both retention and acquisition require sustained marketing investment.
This reality becomes particularly expensive for large brands. Once your penetration exceeds 30%, maintaining growth means spending significant sums just to stand still. I’ve seen executives recoil at this idea – it feels wrong to invest heavily without seeing dramatic gains. But the mathematics of market share are unforgiving: the bigger you are, the harder you must work to stay big.
The cost of ignoring this dynamic is steep. Worldpanel’s research, based on brand growth data collected since 2012, reveals a critical insight: brands that invest in maintaining their growth trajectory deliver better returns than those attempting to recover from decline. Without substantial changes in investment levels across marketing levers, declining brands remain trapped in negative momentum.
The takeaway: momentum matters, and maintenance isn’t optional.
Reversing decline requires substantially more investment than maintaining growth. Unless there’s a substantial change in investment levels across marketing levers, declining brands will likely remained trapped in negative momentum.
Source: Brand Footprint 2025
According to Worldpanel, brands that invest in maintaining their growth trajectory deliver better returns than those trying to recover from a decline. The data below also seems to suggest that while increase in growth may not be as dramatic (room to grow shrinks) but the change in decline is steeper.
The most reliable path to brand growth is through growing penetration.
According to the World Panel data, over the past 13 years, 88% of growing brand increased the number of people who bought the brand. Data from Ehrenberg-Bass Institute shows the same, brand growth comes primarily through penetration. In fact, brand that gain penetration also end up improving purchase frequency.
Focus on tactics that help increase the number of shoppers.
What should be your target penetration growth?
According to World Panel, data gathered over the past 12 years, including the periods with the pandemic and high inflation, each year roughly 50% of brands while the remaining 50% of the brand shrink.
The insight: You’re more likely to grow if you’re intentional about growing brand penetration – getting more consumers to buy your brand.
According to the same data, “From 2013 to 2019, growing brands averaged 1,2 penetration points gained. Over the past five years that average has increased to 1,6 penetration points.”
The bar for growth has increased. Recommendation from World Panel is to aim 1% annual growth in penetration.
The most important decision a brand manager has to make every year is deciding which categories and markets to invest in.
All markets and categories don’t grow every year. We’ve seen this happen during the pandemic and the last couple of years with high inflation where our buying habits change.
How much you’re able to grow comes down to the environment you’re in and your past performance. When planning for growing brand penetration follow this planning ladder. Starting at the top.
- Region
- Market
- Category
- Audience
- Portfolio
- Products
General Mill’s Remarkable Experience Framework
No matter how big you are, you probably have a competitor that can rival your capabilities and spending power or a scrappy alternative that’s quietly stealing your customers. Competition does for companies what adversity does for people. It teaches us new skills. It makes us better and more resilient. But only when you’re intentional about learning.
General Mills offers a practical example of this intentional approach. In their last earnings call, the company’s management explained how they systematically compare their capabilities and strengths against competitors using what they call the Remarkable Experience Framework. The framework focuses on five key elements:
- Superior product/package design – Ensuring product quality and packaging stands out from competition
- Brand communication – Sharpening messaging to be top of mind when consumers are making buying decisions
- Omnichannel execution – Optimising presence across retail channels, both physical and digital
- Compelling value – Addressing price points and price gaps versus competition
- Consumer value (also referred to as price value) – Ensuring offerings are accessible at the right price points to consumers
Key quote:
“We want to drive category growth and capture our fair share of that growth. And I am convinced that we can hold and grow share in our categories by focusing on remarkability. And what we’ve done is we’ve benchmarked our peers, P&G being one of them, and developed what we call the Remarkable Experience Framework. […] And what we know in using this framework is brands that consistently beat the competition in 3 or 4 of those measures will deliver sustainable penetration and share growth over time.”
Jeff Harmening, CEO General Mills. Quarterly Earnings call 2025.