Snack Industry Brands Report

According to the snacks industry trade body SNACMA, the UK crisps and savoury snacks market was estimated at £2,226 million in 2016.

That’s a lot of spend to play for, and much of it is brand driven.

When you’re rushing round your favourite supermarket during the weekly shop, do you take the time to analyse each individual snack on offer, or do you instinctively grab off the shelf the brand that you’re familiar with or is top of mind thanks to the ad you just saw?

Do you buy the brand that’s familiar and trusted when you’re at the local store and need a quick pick-me-up? When a friend or your partner asks what they should pick you up, do you ask for the most familiar one because it’s the easiest to remember?

For many consumers, the answer to those questions is more often than not ‘yes’ – and this is why snack brands plough millions of pounds into ‘above the line’ advertising campaigns across TV, radio and billboards as well as digital.

According to the Grocer, “Bagged snacks brands have rustled up a whopping 47% growth in ad spend over the past year [2015], taking the total spent on traditional ad space to £29.8m.” And who spends the most? “Walkers tops the table, having splashed out £6.7m on advertising.”

To capture a share of this lucrative market, it’s essential to be well known, and well liked.

So which brands are winning across those two major criteria, and what else can we learn about the snacks industry from Attest’s first Snack Brand Index?

Top heavy

This is a top heavy market, with 101 different brands mentioned, less than half of the number of brands that could be named in our Alcohol Brand Index.

A brand had to have just 0.5% of unprompted brand recall to be in the Top 20 brands, and 1% to be in the Top 10.

It is dominated by Walkers, with a massive unprompted recall of 41%.

In our snack brand leadership matrix, we focused on the top 10 brands, who all had an unprompted brand recall of at least 1% and above.

Within that leadership matrix, we can see that crisps are the largest sub-category when it comes to brand recognition, with 3 crips named in the top 5: Walkers, Pringles and Doritos.

The next most competitive category with multiple brands named was chocolate and confectionery: Cadbury, Snickers, Mars, Nestle and Kit Kat were all in the Top 10.

In every other category, there was just one clear winner:

McVities for biscuits; KP Snacks for nuts; Graze for health snacks; and Tesco as an outlier, representing retailers.

Interestingly not a single popcorn or baked goods brand had a brand recall of 1% or more, both of which are defined as major sub-categories by SNACMA.

Well liked

A positive takeaway for the industry is how well liked it is overall.

The industry’s average Net Promoter Score (NPS) was a really strong 49%.

This was higher for females (53.2%) and a little lower for males (48.9%), but fairly consistent.

Looking at different age groups, it is strong for Gen Z (21 and under) at 48.6%, but drops to 43.4% for Millennials (22-35), then leaping up to 56.1% for Gen X (36-55) and then rising even further to 57.1% amongst Boomers (55+).

Interestingly, just like in the Alcohol Index, those living in London gave the lowest average NPS across the UK (just 39.9).

This suggests there is more work to be done by snack brands to win over younger audiences and those in the capital, where a trend towards a more health conscious lifestyle has very much taken hold.

Strong purchase intent

Another key takeaway from the data is how strong a correlation there is between knowing a brand and the likelihood that consumers are likely to buy it.

66.2% of consumers were ‘very likely’ to purchase from a brand they could name, with a further 26.4% ‘likely’ to do so.

This stays relatively consistent across ages, gender and locations – though females are slightly more likely to purchase, with Londonders and Millennials underindexing on ‘very likely to purchase’ versus the UK average.

The major factor affecting purchase intent is Net Promoter Score (NPS).

For brands with an NPS of 6 or below, a ‘very likely’ to purchase intent reduces to just 13.9% while ‘very unlikely’ grows from .3% to 1.7%. On the opposite end of the spectrum, those giving a 9 or a 10 in NPS were 88.7% ‘very likely’ to purchase that brand.

This goes to show the importance of measuring NPS for snack brands.

Key attributes

What do consumers want in a top snack brand? As you can see from our wordcloud, the top 3 attributes are: Taste, Brand and Quality.

Snack Index Leaders

The overall leaders of our first Snack Brand Index were as follows:

You can see how this looks plotted as both Total Brand Equity (TBE) and against the matrix of ‘well known and well liked.’

Because Walkers is so dominant, it’s also worth looking at the landscape with them removed.

A few quick takeaways

Walkers sits comfortably at the top of the table in terms of both unprompted brand awareness and Total Brand Equity (though it lags behind a little on Brand Strength).

This will be good news for parent company PepsiCo, which continues to invest heavily in marketing Walkers to the public, with high profile endorsements from Gary Lineker and sponsorship of UEFA.

It also seems to be paying off financially, with their latest results showing their Frito-Lay division (which includes Walkers and Doritos) grew 3%.

The lesson here is that in a popular category, where awareness often correlates to purchase intent, above the line marketing campaigns help drive sales.  

Of all the brands listed here, Snickers may want to take a look at their NPS and purchase intent scores the hardest as they are quite off the pace. This may indicate a time to refresh their long-running and award winning “You’re not you when you’re hungry” campaign.

While it has historically been very successful, Snickers sales (like most leading chocolate brands) have suffered recently, dropping 6.4% or £5.4 million.

One of the main reasons that chocolate has taken a nosedive recently is consumers’ desire for healthier snacks, and we can see Graze is being rewarded handsomely. While not quite a billion dollar brand like others on our list, it is rumoured to be valued at £300 million, and has clearly hit the sweet spot for consumers.

In conclusion

The snacks sector is a tough one to crack, but the rewards for doing so are huge.

Recall is strongly correlated to purchase intent, with NPS being the other major factor.

Measuring these key metrics will help you to figure out which aspects of your brand need to be worked on so you can stay (or break into) the top echelons.

And if your brand wasn’t featured, we can help you run a tailored brand equity matrix specific to your category or target consumer (e.g. just for protein snacks, or just for flavoured popcorn).

Get in touch to learn more.