What’s the Killer Performance Indicator for grocery product growth?
Well, one stat you should absolutely positively track is consecutive repeat purchase rate (CRPR).
It shows how often people pick your brand on back-to-back purchases of the category. E.g., how often you get bought twice in a row.
Jared Schrieber & the Numerator crew crunched the numbers and found that this is the main stat that helps separate winners from losers. Growers from shrinkers. Bloomers from stinkers. Victors from….
For instance, 57% of Downy purchases are back-to-back, vs 32% for Purex. So 2/3 of the time, people don’t buy Purex twice in a row and are thus picking other brands in the category a lot too.
The actual values that separate a winner from a loser are category-dependent. But the relative difference is crucial to your brand’s health.
So, f’rinstance, Kind bars with a 35% CRPR are winning, while Nutri-Grain bars at 28% are not. It’s only a 7% difference absolutely, but relatively speaking, it’s a chasm.
CRPR is kind of a magical number. Using some math called Markov chains, you can also estimate current market share, long-term market share for the category, and people’s underlying brand preferences. It’s extremely cool.
And most importantly, it helps you predict if your product is gonna fly or flop.
The great Joel Rubinson waxes poetic about CRPR — and talks a bit more about how to use Markov Chains at joelrubinson.net.
Does advertising help increase the CRPR? For sure. It reminds people you exist, and maybe lets them know where, or that there’s a sale, etc.
But even more important is whether the product delivers. Whether people like it. And I’m not saying it has to be an objectively superior product: it just has to be a great “offering”: product, price, packaging, availability, etc.
So some lessons:
🍊Be sure to track your brand’s CRPR & how it’s doing compared to other brands.
🍊Use some Markov Chain math to learn more about the category.
🍊Check out Numerator, Jared’s book Breakout Brands, and Joel Rubinson’s writing.