Are old people more brand loyal?

Like, as we age, do we narrow down our brand repertoires & buy the same thing over & over?

This is a common assumption: that the older we get, the more set in our ways we get. And so the more we buy our favorite brand. 

My friend Benjamin Cawthray at Kantar wondered about this. So he checked Kantar’s panel of ~30,000 UK households across ten category-leading grocery brands.  

One measure of brand loyalty (lord I hate that term) is ‘share of wallet’ (SoW): f’rinstance, what percent of a household’s bottled water purchases go to a single brand, like Evian (the category leader)?

First, he found that older households do seem to devote a higher SoW to leading brands. 

Second, he found that it totally depends on the category — and in particular, how frequently the category is bought in a year, and how many brands compete in it. 

BUT there was a huge mitigating factor at play: older households tended to buy the category much less. Without kids, with shrinking appetites, etc., older HHs just buy stuff less frequently. 

So when you control for category purchase rate, the difference in SoW for older HHs mostly goes away.

Caveats galore, of course. But it’s a nice piece of analysis that challenges one of our big assumptions about older shoppers. 

Some lessons:

🍊 Check your assumptions about the buying habits of older people. 

🍊 Control for category purchase rate when analyzing or comparing categories. Maybe compare based on # of purchases, not an arbitrary time period like 3 months or a year.

🍊 Control for category purchase rate when analyzing or comparing shoppers.

🍊 Don’t forget to market to older people. Besides, that’s where all the money is.