Shopper Digest: From Behaviour to Attitude

When exploring a new category, many questions arise as we seek to understand shopper behaviour within it. Are there fewer shoppers now? Are they buying more or less? Who are these shoppers, and where are they purchasing their products?

Thanks to our consistent tracking of purchasing behaviour – Penetration, Frequency, and Basket Size – we are able to break down these questions and generate meaningful insights. Often, however, these insights lead to a second layer of questioning: Why? Why are they buying more or less? Why is one brand performing better than another? While we can form hypotheses based on the trends in our data, sometimes it is best to obtain more concrete answers to these questions.

Behavioural Trend

The category under discussion today is a Food category. We often begin with a contextual understanding of behavioural trends, asking foundational questions that led us to discover that the shopper base for the category remained stable. However, shoppers were purchasing significantly less year on year — not just with smaller baskets, but also less frequent purchases.

With the support of our special analyses, we found that the primary driver of the decline came from existing shoppers who reduced their purchases over the year. This was evident across most major brands within the category. Simultaneously, shoppers were adding more brands to their repertoire, driven by a specific segment in the category.

At first glance, these two findings appear contradictory. If shoppers are choosing a wider range of brands, shouldn’t total category spend increase? This naturally led to the next layer of questions: Why is this happening? And what can we do about it?

To address these questions, a PanelVoice survey was launched – one of Worldpanel’s cornerstone Advanced Analytics solutions. Now that we had clarity on the challenges facing both the category and the client’s brand, a detailed and targeted survey was sent to our panellists.

Survey criteria were defined based on past purchasing behaviour – in this case, panellists who had purchased the category within a specific channel. The goal was to optimise the client’s brand strategy in that channel and to explore how to grow within a declining category.

Attitudinal Understanding

Through the PanelVoice study, we were able to enrich the behavioural findings with attitudinal insights. For example, we learned why shoppers were switching from our client’s brand to smaller, lower-priced competitors. We also helped identify which attributes the client’s brand was strongly associated with, and where competitors were outperforming. These findings allowed the client to sharpen its strategy and determine which strengths to emphasise in future brand communications.

Furthermore, the attributes were ranked by derived importance. Unlike claimed importance – which simply reflects frequency of selection in the survey – our method links survey responses with actual purchase data. This adds more weight to the views of heavier shoppers, allowing us to determine which attributes matter most for driving real value and volume growth.

The first step to understanding category and brand performance is to start with our core KPIs: Penetration, Frequency, and Basket Size. We then dig deeper using our Special Analyses, such as Source of Volume Change (SOVC) and New, Lapsed & Repeat (NLR) frameworks. To further explain emerging trends, we can hypothesise – or we can go directly to the shoppers exhibiting the observed behaviours and ask them: Why? Why are they buying less? Why are they switching to other brands?

With our Analytics PanelVoice surveys, we can do exactly that – helping refine and sharpen brand strategies.

By studying our panel data, we can learn a great deal about category dynamics. Digging one level deeper with Special Analyses helps explain these trends. And going straight to the shoppers helps us understand the why behind their behaviours. This is where our Advanced Analytics solutions truly shine. PanelVoice surveys – among our most widely used tools – allow for highly targeted questioning of specific shopper groups, with responses weighted against actual purchasing patterns for greater accuracy and actionable insight.

Source: P2 2025 database, Worldpanel Malaysia