Category growth
The impact of assortment and pricing
More modest price increases help winning
Like brands, winning categories over the past five years increased prices less than losing categories. In times of economic uncertainty the financial expense of a purchase clearly seemed to matter. Both groups saw a comparably small decline in the share of promotional sales whilst winning categories experience a slightly higher gain for Private Labels (from a smaller base, see last week’s entry).
New offerings help winning
Innovation pays off, also in difficult times. In categories that experienced the most volume growth more new products and more new variants were launched than in categories with the biggest volume drops. These launches lead to a substantially more pronounced growth in terms of assortment size (14% vs 1.4%). Meaningful variety can keep shoppers involved.
Winning categories offer more (branded) choice
Winning categories offer more choice (their assortment is 44% larger than the assortment of losing categories), and have added to this offering more over the past five years (see previous entry). Brands in particular contribute to the variety offered. Both in terms of number of brands in the category and the branded assortment size, winning categories outperform losing categories by more than 50%.