Loyalty Deficits for Small Share Brands

Analysis of brand performance based on the relationship between brand size and consumer choice behaviour is a common procedure for repertoire and subscription markets. The more popular a brand (the more customers it has), the more often those customers tend to buy it. Thus, loyalty (repeat purchase) is a function of brand size as captured by the Dirichlet model and the Double Jeopardy Law. The law-like relationship between brand size and repeat buying has been shown to hold for large brands—the top ten or even twenty brands in a category. But little work has been done to analyse whether the same rules apply for smaller brands, yet, this is important since small brands by far outnumber their larger opponents in any category. This paper documents and quantifies negative deviations from the Double Jeopardy line for low market share brands in 35 UK FMCG categories consisting of 430 brands and 37 ‘others’. In this, deficit in repeat purchase is discussed from the point of a brand’s size. This work redresses gaps in our knowledge of small brand performance metrics. Initial findings show small brands tend to underperform their expected loyalty metrics. More research is underway into small brand dynamics (growth/decline) and microbrands—that are too small to show up in panel data.