By Rasmus Östman, CEO at Genero.
Everyone knows FMCG is competitive—but most brands still fly blind when it comes to understanding what actually drives growth.
Walk into any supermarket and you’ll see the same scene: crowded shelves, dozens of brands fighting for a few seconds of consumer attention. Every product seems to be shouting louder than the next. For FMCG marketers, this isn’t just noise—it’s the battlefield.
Distribution is saturated, consumers are distracted, and loyalty is fragile. The average consumer is exposed to over 10,000 brand messages per day. Amid this chaos, attention is short and memory is unreliable.
Most brands respond by throwing more money at media. More ads. More discounts. More activations. But the brutal truth is this: without the right framework, most of that spend disappears without impact.
If FMCG is a knife fight in a crowded aisle, the winners aren’t the ones with the biggest budgets. They’re the ones with the sharpest measurement and the clearest strategy.
Rasmus Östman
Product, place, and price are table stakes—Promotion is the battlefield
Every marketer knows the 4Ps: product, place, price, promotion. But in today’s market,
three of those are simply the cost of entry.
- Product: Functional parity is everywhere. Unless you’re truly disruptive, your competitor can match you in a year.
- Place: Shelf space is brutal. Even when you win distribution, that doesn’t guarantee shopper pull.
- Price: Competing on price is a race to the bottom. Private label will always undercut you.
That leaves promotion. And it’s not about who shouts the loudest—it’s about who builds memory, desire, and measurable demand.
The question isn’t “how do we advertise more?” It’s “how do we systematically create consumer demand, prove it, and scale it without waste?”
Why traditional measurement fails
The obvious response to “promotion is the battlefield” is: great, then let’s promote harder.
That’s exactly what most FMCG brands do. Bigger budgets, more impressions, more ads, heavier discounts. And yet, growth stalls. Why? Because the way we’ve measured promotion for decades is broken.
- Impressions show how many people might have seen your ad—not whether they noticed, cared, or remembered.
- GRPs (Gross Rating Points) make media agencies happy, but they don’t tell you what moves products off shelves.
- Last-click attribution credits the final touch—not what built demand in the first place.
These metrics look precise, but they tell you nothing about what’s actually driving growth.
What matters is simpler and sharper:
To get beyond noise, we need sharper tools:
- Reach – Did we get in front of the right people?
- Engagement – Did they interact enough to care?
- Frequency – Did they see us often enough to remember?
This is the frontline of FMCG promotion. If you can’t track these three touchpoints day-to-day,
you’re not measuring growth – you’re just measuring noise.
A 2022 Nielsen study found that campaigns with high on-target reach delivered 10x better ROI than those that missed the mark—$2.60 return for every $1 spent, versus just $0.25 when targeting failed.
Engagement isn’t soft either. It’s a signal of sales readiness. One study found that content with strong engagement drove $285 in incremental sales per 1,000 impressions—proving that content that connects also converts.
And while more frequency used to mean more impact, that rule no longer holds. In some cases, just one exposure per week delivered the highest incremental sales for CPG brands. Bombarding consumers? Not the answer. It’s about timing and balance.
It’s not just how often you show up—it’s when. Recency—especially in the 48 hours before purchase — now outperforms repetition. FMCG brands are shifting from volume-based planning to relevance-based timing.
From noise to growth, from metrics to momentum
So if impressions, GRPs, and last-click aren’t enough, what’s the alternative? You need a framework that connects daily consumer touchpoints to long-term brand growth.
When Reach, Engagement, and Frequency align, you get momentum:
- Reach puts your brand into the consideration set.
- Engagement signals that your content is doing its job.
- Frequency builds memory so your brand shows up when it matters – at the shelf.
When these three line up, they create a measurable demand signal. And when you
zoom out month-to-month, that signal shows up in Share of Search—the strongest
predictor of category growth and market share shifts. In a study of 105 brands across 12 categories, a rise in Share of Search reliably predicted future market share shifts.
Stack these layers and you get a measurement system:
- Daily: Reach, Engagement, Frequency
- Monthly: Share of Search, Market Share
- Quarterly: MMM and ROI for budget optimization
This is how you move from marketing noise to marketing growth.
When one link breaks, the chain fails
Here’s what happens when one metric falters:
- Low Reach: Great creative, solid engagement, perfect frequency—but only 10% of your audience sees it. Result: fan club, not brand growth.
- Low Engagement: You reach everyone, hammer them with ads—but no one clicks, shares, or remembers. Result: wasted impressions.
- Low Frequency: People see you once and never again. Result: forgotten at the point of purchase.
Each weakness translates directly into wasted budget. You’re paying for distribution or
creative without creating the mental availability that drives purchase. And that’s why
tracking all three—Reach, Engagement, Frequency—isn’t optional. It’s the cost of
playing the promotion game.
In a world of thin margins, distracted consumers, and commoditized products, measurement is your edge.
Brands that track what matters—daily to quarterly—don’t just advertise. They grow.
Because if you can’t prove it, you can’t scale it.