From Trial to Repeat: How Consumer Insights Help Growing Brands Build Loyalty

Customer loyalty is undergoing a dramatic shift, not because consumers have changed what they want but how quickly they are willing to walk away and look for alternatives. Nearly one in three consumers stopped buying from a brand in 2025 because of a poor experience, a reminder that loyalty is fragile and must be earned in the moments that matter most.

Part of the fragility stems from today’s omnichannel environment. The shopper journey is no longer linear, as buyers jump between multiple channels and touchpoints – discovering a product on social media, checking reviews on a marketplace, comparing prices on a retailer’s app, and eventually buying in-store or online.

This fragmented path means that brands must deliver clarity and consistency at every step. A single disconnect, whether from mixed messaging, inconsistent pricing, lack of availability, or a weak product experience, can cause a shopper to temporarily or entirely abandon a brand. 

Savvier, frequently-switching shoppers expect brands to anticipate their needs, respect their data, and deliver a seamless experience wherever they show up. In this increasingly complex landscape, small and medium-sized brands (SMBs) often have an advantage: authenticity, a clear founder story, and operational agility. This makes them more credible and emotionally resonant – crucial ingredients for loyalty in today’s markets.

Data, including customer loyalty insights, help level the playing field, with room for emerging and legacy brands alike. SMBs can access and leverage a wealth of information to build a following with consumers and – equally important – build strong relationships with retailers.

Why Precision and Consistency Define Brand Experience Among Emerging and Growing Brands

Beyond the traditional levers of points, promotions, and price, loyalty is now built on the intertwined forces of consistent experiences and precise execution. The consumer journey starts before the first click or shelf glance and continues well after purchase: discovery, consideration, trial, usage, service, and advocacy. Every handoff must feel intentional and aligned. When expectations and experience are aligned, customers come back. When they are not, people might leave and rarely return.

Consistency is only half of the equation. For growing brands, precision – being deliberate about placement, messaging, and targeting – is what turns limited resources into meaningful impact. Rather than casting a wide net, SMBs must ensure they are on the right shelf, in the right stores, reaching the right shoppers. Data becomes essential here: understanding shopper demographics, behaviors, and sentiment allows brands to focus distribution where their ideal buyer is already shopping. This targeted approach helps smaller brands compete effectively against larger players with bigger budgets and broader placement.

Once a product is on the shelf, the focus shifts to tracking performance: Are consumers finding the product? Are they buying it? And, most importantly, are they coming back for more?

The path from trial to repeat may involve obstacles, but it’s also full of opportunities for brands that know what signals to monitor and which levers to adjust. Clear insight into what’s working (and why) allows SMBs to refine pricing, messaging, promotions, and distribution in ways that fuel repeat purchases and build long‑term loyalty.

What Are Consumer Loyalty Insights and What Do They Reveal?

Consumer loyalty insights are data-driven understandings of shopper behaviors, preferences, and trends that reveal how and why consumers engage with brands over time. These insights are derived from various sources, such as receipt panels and surveys, and enable brands to identify patterns in trial, repeat purchases, and long-term loyalty. By analyzing these insights, brands can better understand the factors that drive consumer retention, switching behaviors, and advocacy.

For nimble, high-potential brands, leveraging loyalty insights is about maximizing both mental availability (ensuring consumers think of your brand) and physical availability (ensuring your products are accessible). These businesses can use loyalty data to pinpoint high-value segments, innovate strategically, optimize their marketing spend, and enhance customer experiences without requiring massive budgets. Ultimately, such insights give brands the opportunity to compete effectively by focusing on their unique value propositions and understanding their niche audiences.

Mapping the Loyalty Journey from Trial to Advocacy

The loyalty journey can be mapped into four key stages:

• Trial: This is the initial stage in which consumers try a product or service for the first time. Insights at this stage reveal what motivates “triers” to make their first purchase, such as promotions, packaging, or word-of-mouth recommendations. For small and midsized brands, focusing on trial can involve targeted sampling campaigns or introductory offers.

• Repeat: At this stage, consumers make subsequent purchases, indicating satisfaction with the product. Loyalty insights here help brands understand what drives repeat purchases, such as product quality, availability, or pricing. For smaller brands, ensuring consistent product availability and quality is critical to fostering repeat behavior.

• Habit: This stage represents the transition from occasional purchases to regular buying behavior. Insights reveal the factors that turn repeat buyers into habitual customers, such as convenience, emotional connection, or perceived value. SMBs can leverage this by creating subscription models or loyalty programs that reward frequent purchases.

• Advocacy: The final stage is when loyal customers actively promote the brand to others. Insights here focus on understanding what drives advocacy, such as exceptional customer service, unique brand identity, or community engagement.

Loyalty Signals to Track

Several datasets are invaluable to scaling brands as they work to understand purchase behaviors, the motivations behind those actions, the path to purchase and lost buyer choices.

Sales data allows high potential brands to assess performance across a variety of metrics. Among other insights, SMBs can gauge the following:

• Trial and repeat rates: This is the most fundamental metric. Tracking the percentage of households that try your product and then go on to purchase it again is essential. If you see high trial rates but low repeat rates, it signals a problem that needs immediate attention.

• Share of requirements/loyalty: This metric measures how much of a consumer's spending within a specific category is dedicated to your brand. A high share of requirements indicates that you have a loyal buyer who seeks out your product over competitors. This is a powerful data point to share with retailers.

• Basket value: Does your product increase the total amount a shopper spends at the store? Proving that your product drives a larger basket size is incredibly persuasive for retailers. It shows that stocking your item benefits their bottom line across the entire store.

• Deal dependency: It's crucial to understand how many of your initial trials were driven by promotions. If trial rates drop as soon as a discount ends, you may be relying too heavily on deals to "buy" your customers.

When presented to a retailer, a story built on high loyalty, strong repeat rates, and increased basket value is far more persuasive than a simple sales pitch.

Rich shopper analytics, including those gleaned from accessible survey tools, provide the "why" behind the numbers, allowing a business to fine-tune pricing, promotion, and shelf strategies with remarkable precision.

• Store-level optimization: Data can help identify the best-fit stores for specific promotional activities, ensuring trade dollars are invested where they will have the greatest impact. This is particularly vital for SMBs that may only have distribution in a limited number of stores.

• Merchandising and marketing effectiveness: Analytics can also reveal which in-store tactics resonate most with the target consumer. Do these shoppers respond best to end-cap displays, in-aisle shippers, or on-shelf coupons? Granular insights like these help growing brands design promotions that grab attention and drive that crucial first purchase.

Using Loyalty Insights to Improve Trial, Repeat and Retailer Relationships

Shifting from trial to frequent purchase to fandom requires a combination of shrewd tactics and a deep understanding of retailer needs and shopper motivations. To unlock that combination, growth-focused brands can take a number of steps that don’t require a massive use of resources.

Address the drop-off from trial to repeat

If you're getting people to try your product but they aren't coming back, something is clearly off. A myriad of reasons affect loyalty in the fragmented retail ecosystem.

For example, pricing could be a deterrent. Your product might be priced too high compared to competitors. Analyze pricing and promotion strategies in your category to see where you can compete more effectively without devaluing your brand.

The product itself may be an issue. Product dissatisfaction is a critical issue to diagnose quickly.

A powerful, low-cost tactic to combat these and other factors behind issues with repeat purchases is to survey new buyers directly and ask them why they didn't pick up that item again. Was there a barrier to purchase? What did they like or dislike about the product? This direct feedback is crucial, allowing you to course-correct your product or marketing strategy before losing more potential repeat customers.

Find your customer beyond the store

Building a brand is about building a relationship. To do that, you need to understand who your customer is beyond their shopping habits. Psychographic data can build a rich profile of your buyer, revealing their interests, hobbies, and media consumption.

For example, a brand might discover through insights that its target consumer is regularly engaged with a certain sporting event, such as a global racing series or football tournament. This information can lead them to partner with smaller, regional events with similar followings, a cost-effective and highly personalized way to connect with their audience.

By understanding what customers care about, high potential businesses find partnership and co-promotional opportunities that feel authentic and foster engagement and longer-lasting relationships. This is especially true for social media, where an emerging or midsized brand can use data to understand how and where its customers are active online, allowing them to tailor content and promotions for maximum impact.

Use a basket analysis for smarter co-promotions

Another effective strategy is to understand what other products customers buy. Basket analysis reveals which items are frequently purchased alongside yours.

This opens the door to co-promotional displays with other brands, including both big and small brands. Think of how retailers group all the ingredients for green bean casserole together during Thanksgiving or grilling essentials at the kickoff of the summer season. By identifying these natural pairings, an SMB can successfully vie for high-impact display space with complementary products to drive trial and awareness.

The Liquid Data Go® Difference

For many SMBs, the idea of leveraging this level of data might seem daunting and expensive. That's where Circana’s Liquid Data Go® solution comes in. Designed specifically for the needs of growing brands, it makes powerful insights accessible, affordable, and actionable. These businesses can use the solution to answer questions about consumer behavior and brand loyalty.

• Scalable and reasonable: Liquid Data Go is built to grow with your business. It offers an affordable entry point to a wealth of information, giving you the insights you need without the enterprise-level price tag. As your brand expands, the solution scales with you.

• Self-serve insights: The solution empowers you to be your own data analyst. With self-guided tools and templated surveys, a high-potential brand can get answers to their most pressing questions quickly. They can run a new trier survey to find out why customers didn't repeat, launch a path-to-purchase survey to see if their marketing is effective, or even conduct concept testing for a new product before launch. This puts data-driven decision-making directly in the business’s hands.

• An integrated ecosystem: Liquid Data Go doesn't exist in a vacuum. The insights can serve as a launchpad for deeper work with other Circana solutions. If you discover pricing is an issue, for instance, you can explore a more advanced price-pack architecture analysis. If you need to refine your shelf strategy, the data can inform a consumer decision tree project. It’s the starting point for a comprehensive, data-backed growth strategy.

By putting the right product in front of the right consumer in the right store and on the right shelf, SMBs can build a loyal customer base that forms the foundation for long-term success.