- Circana
- 4 hours ago
- 4 min read
Table of Contents:
Robust insights can be used to help find and pull those levers. By assessing the factors that fuel growth, measuring them effectively, and translating data into action, brands can execute impactful business strategies that bolster brand equity and protect or gain market share.
What Are the Key Drivers of Brand Growth?
Pinpointing forces that drive growth is a first step in building a successful brand strategy. Certain growth drivers are universal and timeless. For example, availability and visibility are critical across all industries and remain top considerations as brands strive to maintain their audiences and constantly work to fill the proverbial “leaky bucket.”
Another time-tested driver is emotional connection. Tapping into consumers’ feelings can create lasting bonds, whether you're selling a beverage or a household cleaner. The scent of a cleaning product, for example, can evoke a feeling of accomplishment and calm, creating a positive association that transcends the product's basic function.
Some drivers are industry-specific. Package design and shelf placement are essential to standing out in crowded categories such as beverages. For slower-moving categories like luxury goods or automotive, drivers might lean more heavily on brand legacy and perceived quality.
Consumer relevancy is an emerging driver that impacts many industries and categories. Brands that have a clear point of view, stand for something, and connect with consumers on a deeper level differentiate themselves and their offerings. The concept of relevancy ties directly into brand perception, which is shaped by everything from pricing and innovation to both physical and mental availability. All of these elements work in tandem to influence growth.
Drivers are often different between new and established brands. For emerging brands, the primary focus is on increasing availability, building awareness, and educating consumers about who they are. These new entrants can often be more provocative and disruptive, taking chances that larger, established brands might avoid.
Established brands, on the other hand, must tread more carefully. They have a legacy and a loyal customer base to protect, which makes radical changes riskier. For them, the key to growth is often innovation. This means continuing to stay relevant with their current consumers while simultaneously innovating to meet new needs or attract new demographics by extending into new categories or refreshing portfolios to align with current trends.
How Do Brands Research and Measure Growth Drivers?
Once a brand identifies its potential growth drivers, the next step is to research and measure them effectively. This requires a combination of robust data and sharp analytical methods.
Point-of-sale (POS) data provides an excellent foundation for understanding sales trends, distribution, and velocity. Brands can build on that with consumer panel data that allows them to truly understand the consumer and learn who is buying the brand, who is not, and who is purchasing from competitors.
Engaging directly with verified buyers provides richer, actionable insights. By surveying these consumers, a brand can uncover what they like and dislike, identify opportunities for product development, and concept-test new innovations. This enables them to pull the important growth levers of getting more people to buy and encouraging people to buy more often.
As brands work to determine and measure growth drivers, they can also take steps to avoid common mistakes, like developing tunnel vision. By looking only within a very narrow, pre-defined category, companies miss out on the disruptive forces and interesting insights happening at the periphery.
A bottled water brand, for instance, might only focus on competing with other still water brands. In doing so, they miss the bigger picture. They fail to see competition from functional sodas, flavored water powders that enhance tap water, and even the rise of high-end reusable water bottles. The most significant innovations often blur category lines, so maintaining a broad perspective is crucial for identifying both threats and opportunities.
How Can Brands Identify the Most Impactful Growth Drivers?
To determine which drivers will have the biggest impact, brands need to keep a finger on the pulse of sales performance. With omnichannel purchase data, it's possible to quantify the potential of different strategies. For instance, brands can utilize data that projects the revenue opportunity of gaining an additional point of penetration versus increasing the average number of trips a consumer makes. This quantification helps connect growth drivers directly to revenue outcomes.
Sophisticated analytics also help brands separate correlation from causation. Just because two variables move together over time doesn't mean one causes the other. Using tools such as multivariate regression and decomposition analysis, a company can determine how much of its brand performance was attributed to a specific variable.
For example, insights can quantify how much of a 20% growth was due to an effective change in economic conditions versus a new marketing campaign. This helps separate uncontrollable drivers, such as consumer trends or economic shifts that affect the whole category, from controllable ones, like price, promotion, and marketing. These tools provide a framework that allows a brand to ask the right questions and dig deeper in the right places.
How often should brands reassess growth drivers? The frequency of assessment depends on the type of driver. For large-scale, uncontrollable trends, an annual or biannual review is typically sufficient because it provides enough data to determine if a change is a short-term blip or a long-term trend. For controllable levers like pricing, promotion, and marketing, a more frequent assessment — at least quarterly — is necessary, especially in a highly unpredictable market.
Ultimately, brands need a true understanding the efficacy of their marketing levers because market conditions can shift, sometimes dramatically.
Unlock Your Brand’s Growth and Gain Market Share with Circana’s Solutions
Understanding growth drivers is a multidimensional challenge and requires looking at performance through many different lenses and connecting the dots between them. Circana’s holistic ecosystem of interconnected data assets and analytical tools enables businesses to see the complete picture of their brand value. From consumer panels and POS data to advanced analytics like our Complete Why™ solution, we help you diagnose what’s happening and why. Circana’s marketing effectiveness solutions quantify the impact of campaigns, while our forecasting tools help you anticipate how consumers will respond to the levers you pull. The true power lies in bringing these disparate data streams together into a connected pathway, ensuring you are not just reacting to the market but ar proactively shaping your brand’s future growth.
