Quality is Paramount for Consumer Loyalty to CPG Brands

The CPG landscape continues to battle a challenging environment with inflationary pressures, product availability issues, consumer preferences, and trade-offs. Garnering loyalty among consumers is key for brands as consumers continue to tighten budgets and explore other options. 

Given this unstable environment, what does CPG customer loyalty look like right now? InMobi Insights conducted a survey in Q1 2023 to understand the evolving consumer preferences and trends in CPG and found that health and beauty care (HBC), household goods, and alcohol top the list of categories with the most loyalty, yet quality will determine which brands will and won’t retain customers. The key takeaways include: 

• HBC (71%), household items (69%), and alcohol (68%) are respectively the most loyal categories with less than 32% of remaining sales up for a potential brand switch 
• In the food & beverage category, private labels and national brands both maintain nearly equal share of loyalty. National brands saw a 6% increase in loyalty from consumers who indicated “no preference” in 2022. Once consumers choose their brands they are likely to stick with the change, exposing risk for brands trying to gain consumers’ loyalty 

As we saw with InMobi’s CPG loyalty study in 2022 and reinforced here in 2023, loyalty to private label and national brand are near parity. This exposes the risk of losing consumers for good once they shift. Private label products have become higher quality and therefore more mainstream among consumers as they tighten budgets, exposing national brands to consumer trade-offs toward private label. 

Interested in learning more? Contact InMobi Insights researchers here.