Just 38% of Brits stay loyal to grocery retailers post-pandemic
Only a third of UK consumers stayed loyal to brands during the Covid-19 pandemic, according to research from antuit.ai
The company surveyed over 2,000 Brits for this.
Consumers who switched were more likely to have traded down on grocery retailers during the pandemic than those who traded up from own brand to brands.
20% said they traded down from brands to own brands during the pandemic, compared to just 14% who traded up.
Saving money was the main motivation here (55%), followed by 30% who wanted to try new products and 29% who were concerned about financial uncertainty.
Lack of product availability – from panic buying at the start of the pandemic to shelf gaps prompted by Brexit and the more recent ‘pingdemic’ – also impacted customers’ choices.
Meanwhile, those who traded up did so to spend more on ‘finer’ foods and allocate more discretional spend to groceries because they weren’t socialising (38%), while 33% were happy to trade up to support local brands and businesses at a difficult time.
However, as the pandemic eases, just 15% of this group plan to stick with their pandemic buying habits and will revert back to the own brand goods they bought before the Covid-19 crisis.
Meanwhile, 38% who traded down said they would make the switch from brands to own brand permanently.
Siva Lakshmanan, Co-CEO at antuit.ai, comments: “Consumer packaged goods companies (CPGs) had to deal with a very ‘mixed bag’ over the course of the pandemic – with demand fluctuations prompting unprecedented, unforeseen and fast changing consumer spikes in sales on the one hand, and supply chain disruption, and raw material and labour cost uncertainty on the other.”
“Our research shows that the pandemic confirmed history is not our only indicator of the future, therefore conventional forecasting models are unable predict the unpredictable.”
“As brands look to recover post-pandemic, the imperative will be on making demand forecasting more robust and able to deal accurately and quickly to permanently changed behaviours and the complexity Covid-19 has caused.”
