NEW DELHI: Parle, Amul, Clinic Plus, Britannia and Ghadi have emerged as the top most chosen brands in the country in 2019. Of these, the top four have retained their rankings in the Kantar Brand Footprint Report 2020, while Ghadi detergent displaced homegrown dairy brand Aavin to reclaim the fifth position.
The Brand Footprint report ranks the brands which are being bought by most consumers, most often. These rankings are based on Consumer Reach Points (CRPs) – a measure of the number of households buying a brand and the number of times (frequency) they bought it.
RSPL group’s Ghadi re-entered the list of first five as a result of a 12% increase in Consumer Reach Points. The other top four brands also saw a spike in their CRPs by 12% to 32%, the latter in the case of Clinic Plus shampoo from Hindustan Unilever Ltd.
“Ghadi substantially increased the frequency of purchase of their detergent bars. In addition, they worked on their assortment a lot. This means the SKUs (stock keeping units) in terms of variants and pack sizes. They improved penetration also by nearly 1%," said K Ramakrishnan, managing director, Kantar Worldpanel.
According to the 8th edition of the Kantar Brand Footprint report, at least five brands joined the billion CRP club this year. These include Dabur, Vim (dish wash brand owned by HUL), Sunfeast (food brand from ITC Ltd), Brooke Bond (tea from HUL) and Patanjali. If there were 16 brands in the billion plus CRP club in 2018, the figure is 21 in 2019. For this report, the research agency considered 575 brands across five sectors including foods, home care, health and beauty, beverages and dairy.
Dabur, for instance, with a household penetration of 70%, saw a CRP growth of 34% and was the fifth most chosen beauty and health care brand. Dabur India Ltd chief executive officer Mohit Malhotra said the company covers around 6.7 million outlets in urban and rural India.
“We have invested ahead of the curve in building our rural footprint with our sub-stockist network going up significantly. Over the past one year, we have grown our rural network from 44,000 villages in March 2019 to a little over 52,000 villages in March 2020. With the lockdown easing now, we plan to restart the expansion of our rural footprint and take it up to 60,000 villages by the end of 2020-21," he said. The company has also been creating special products for e-commerce in urban India besides expanding its chemist coverage.
The improved CRP performance by brands reflects the fact that consumers made significantly more choices in 2019. To be sure, among the top 50 brands, two-thirds (36) are brands of Indian origin even though the brands from multinational companies show a stronger 1.8X growth.
Ramakrishnan said large FMCG brands achieved better growth for several reasons. For starters, even before covid-19, FMCG was suffering a slowdown. “We have found that in a slowdown, consumers turn to national, trustworthy brands. Secondly, it was a wake-up call for big national brands when we said that local brands were outperforming them two years ago. The large firms launched small value packs for greater penetration. Lastly, the national brands also increased their assortment or number of SKUs," he said.
Among the top 25 most chosen brands by the consumers are a clutch of Indian dairy brands like Aavin, Nandini, Vijaya and Mother Dairy.
Interestingly, 58 brands in 2019 saw an increase in penetration of more than 1which amounts to an addition of 2.9 million shoppers. Among brands which have gained between 4% and 5% penetration are bathroom cleaner brand Harpic, ITC’s Aashirvaad, and tooth paste brand Close Up.
According to the report, brands that focus on reaching more targets are clearly winning.
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