Competing with a brand consumers have gotten used to

Question: Our healthcare brand is up against an established dominant brand. For the past 8 years, we’ve tried everything. Many others had kept the same pressure, including the No. 2 and No. 3 competitor brands.

According to the last quarterly omnibus survey, the leader brand’s market share remained at 36 percent.  There’s also unchanging market share for the No. 2 brand (at 8 percent) and the No. 3 with a 5 percent share. The rest of the other two and a half dozen brands have market shares of 1 or 2 percent. Our own brand’s market share hovered at around 1.8 percent.

When I said that we’ve tried everything, I really mean “everything”—consumer and trade promos to induce brand switching, advertising, PR and press releases, price discounts, bargain sales, direct and multilevel selling, and others. Sales would go up a little for a while but go back just as quickly to their former level.

Our focus group discussions of the leading brand users found that the most mentioned reason for staying with the leader brand is “kasi nakasanayan na” (because we got used to it). Probing this answer never led us to anything deeper.

So we ask, and please help us with an answer: How should we compete against an established and dominant leader brand that consumers have gotten used to? How do we effectively position against a “nakasanayan na” (gotten-used-to) positioning?

Answer: When a consumer says that she’s using a brand because “nakasanayan na” (she’s gotten used to it), you should know that you’re very far from the truth. It’s either the consumer does not really know the reason or else you asked the wrong question to the wrong respondent.

Why the wrong respondent? What you want to know is how the user of the leader brand can be made to switch to a non-leader brand like yours.

Let’s say we’re talking about the healthcare category of vitamin supplements and Enervon-C is the leader brand. Asking an Enervon-C customer why she is taking Enervon-C will get you reasons like “kasi nakasanayan na” (because I’ve gotten used to it). That kind of answer won’t help much.

The better respondent is a non-user of Enervon-C.

You said the leader brand (let’s say Enervon-C) has 36 percent market share, therefore the non-users comprise 64 percent of the total vitamin users. You can ask any of those non-users what is it in the No. 2 and No. 3 brands, as well as your brand, that they have found that is not in Enervon-C.

From the answers, you will know what it takes specifically to cannibalize into the Enervon-C market segment.

You may immediately observe that there will be as many different reasons as there are follower or non-leader brands. But, in fact, there will be much more since any one brand user will give 1, 2 or 3 reasons. To select the 1 or 2 key brand switching motivators, do not look at the differences. Look for the commonalities. Those commonalities are your cannibalizing positioning.

That is answering your question from the side of the consumer. There’s the other side to consider, namely, the marketer’s or the competitor brands and what those two and a half dozen brands have done to own the 64 percent of non-users of the leading brand. Among them, the No. 2 brand got 8 percent market share while the No. 3 attracted 5 percent of the market. The rest of the brands were able to each get 1 to 2 percent market share.

What did they do to earn those shares? The bigger question of course is: What did the leader brand do to become “nakasanayan na” or a gotten-used-to brand?

Another term for “nakasanayan” or “gotten used to” is to be habituated. The leader brand, say Enervon-C, succeeded in getting 36 percent of supplement users to become habituated to it. To a much lesser extent, the No. 2 brand (say, for example, Centrum) succeeded in habituating 8 percent of supplement users to take it. The No. 3 brand (say, for example, Clusivol) with a 5-percent market share, habituated that many supplement users to stick to Clusivol.

If both leader and non-leader brands succeeded because all of them habituated their own users to stay with their chosen brands, then it must have been a habituating campaign that’s the responsible market share gainer. What does a habituating campaign look like?

We have a concrete example in an ongoing high media weight TV commercial for San Miguel Pale Pilsen. The TVC talent is the Vic Sotto holding a San Miguel beer bottle and saying: “Make any day a THIRST-day. Make a Monday, a thirst-day, a Tuesday, a thirst-day, and each day of the rest of the week, a thirst-day.”

The cognitive psychologist Robert Zajonc proved something in his experiment on “the impact of mere exposure.” When a call-to-action is repeated often enough and reaches an accumulated threshold level, the message is suddenly remembered and further repetition makes its recipients to start liking it.

But repetition alone cannot lead to liking or attitude change. There has to be a “value” in the message that appeals to the recipient consumer’s need. This is where to link with the brand switching positioning in the preceding analysis. The linked 2 sides of your question, i.e., the consumer’s and the marketer’s, provide you with the complete answer to your question.

So next time a question like what you asked presents itself, remember to analyze the 2 sides of the question and link their answers or “connect the two dots.”

Keep your questions coming.  Send them to me at  [email protected].