How to win the World Cup?

Mathilde: The World cup is one of the best things that can happen to a grocery aisle for a month. Demand comes looking for you. Beer, snacks, soft drinks, all lifting at once, almost on their own. So the hard part is not creating the demand, it is deciding how to capture the most of it. And the most valuable move is often not the one everyone expects. Stay with me, because the data points somewhere genuinely surprising. Welcome to FMCG M Weekly, brought to you by Acurus.com, the leading independent consultancy for revenue growth management. I am Mathilde, your AI host this week. One question that every brand in food, drink, snacks and impulse is about to face all over again. Should you promote during the World cup when every single competitor is already promoting too? Picture the night of a big match up and down the country. Fridges are filling with beer. Trolleys are filling with crisps and dips. Living rooms are filling with people who do not normally eat and drink together for a month. One fixture list decides what millions of shoppers buy. And when very few events move a grocery basket the way a World cup does, so the instinct is obvious. Demand is surging, so you support it with a deeper deal. And showing up is right. But when every competitor is shouting at the same moment, your own megaphone does not really make you louder. Here are three things the best brands understand that most do not. The first one is the most misunderstood. During the World cup, the battleground categories, beer, snacks, soft drinks really do grow. And they grow a lot. But here is the subtle part. Most of that growth comes from the base. More people, more occasions, simply consuming more for a month. It would happen with or without your deal. Your promotion sits on top of that bigger base. So yes, your promotional volume rises too, but only in proportion. The deal is not suddenly more powerful just because it is the World Cup. And there is a catch. When everyone is on promotion at the same time, the discounts largely cancel each other out. Your price cut is matched by every rival's, so the relative advantage you would normally gain and the switching that comes with it mostly disappears. Break down what a deep World cup deal actually delivers. And most of it is competitive switching, retail switching and cannibalization that the rest of the market has just neutralized as a way to win genuinely new volume. It is expensive and it is weak, so why promote at all? This is the part that flips the logic. In the battleground, you do not promote to win. You promote to avoid losing. Picture being the one brand that is not on deal, not on display, while every competitor is in the very weeks when Shoppers are buying more than at any other time of the year. You would not simply miss the upside. You would actively lose share and lose it badly. The prize here is not a big incremental gain. It is avoiding a painful decremental loss. So you match the deal to stay in the game and then you find your real growth somewhere else. The m second one is counterintuitive, and it is where the real opportunity hides. The best place to win is usually not where the fight is. While every beer and crisp brand is slugging it out in the same crowded aisle, the categories that ride the exact same occasion. The dips, the mixers, the ice, the party bakery are barely promoted at all. The demand is real. The shelf is wide open. And here is the behavior that makes it work. A shopper building a watch party basket adds those things on top of the normal shop. They are not swapping one brand for another. That is new volume. We call it the open goal and it is the cleanest, cheapest, incremental volume of the whole tournament. The third one is about timing, and it comes straight out of revenue management. Think of the World cup like an aircraft on the Runway. The moment that plane takes off, an empty seat is worth nothing. That revenue is gone for good. Tournament demand works the same way. It is perishable. Once the final whistle goes, you cannot get the occasion back. So the value is captured before and during the event, never after. And in a lot of categories, the single most powerful move is not the big deal during the final. It is quietly loading the shopper's pantry in the buildup while the shelf is still uncontested. Fill someone's cupboard with, uh, three packs before kickoff and you have taken them out of the market for the next three match nights before your competitor has even shown up. We will get into exactly what to do about all this in just a moment. First, a quick word from the people who make this show possible.

Narrator: The era of broad price increases is over, with shoppers counting every penny. The growth that remains has to be found one promotion at a time. But much of what brands spend on promotion grows nothing at all. It funds volume the shopper would have bought anyway, or simply shifts it from one week or one of your own packs to the next. Acurus, uh, helps commercial teams see exactly where their volume comes from, separating real incremental growth from cannibalization, switching and downgrading. Find out how@acurus.com that's a C-C U-R-I-S.com welcome back.

Mathilde: None of this means you sit the World cup out. It means you answer two questions. First. Question one. What is your objective? Are you going for volume to capture every last bit of demand and defend your share? Or are you protecting profit, keeping your investment for the games still to come that decides how hard you play? Where do you stand on the pitch? Are you the category leader, big enough to dominate the aisle? Or are you a challenger who would lose a straight fight on price? Put those two answers together and every brand falls into one of four groups. There is the battleground. Beer, soft drinks, snacks, energy drinks. Demand explodes and everyone promotes. You match the deal because the cost of vanishing is far higher than the cost of the discount. But you do not win there on depth. You win on visibility, on pack, on occasion. Riding that bigger base instead of chasing a discount war that cancels itself out. There is the open goal we just talked about. Ride the occasion that the big categories are paying to create and do it before and during while almost nobody else is there. There are the reflex promoters think coffee or tea. They discount hard every summer. But the lift is the calendar, not the football. Here the smart move is restraint. Let your competitors burn their margin. And there are the bystanders. Home care, pet care, most of personal care. The event is simply not theirs. If you run several categories, take that budget and move it to where it can actually work. Because it matters enormously if you are not the biggest brand in your aisle. A challenger should never go toe to toe with the leader on price. You will lose. Instead, poach a different occasion. Premium hosting, daytime viewing, use value add like extra free packs instead of slashing your price and wrecking your brand equity. And own the digital shelf, the quick commerce apps where there are no aisle ends to lose and the playing field is finally level. And a word on this particular tournament. It is being played across North American time zones which pushes the big games late into the European evening and night. Expect the action to move out of the pub and into the living room. That means bigger sharing, multi packs, more frozen and convenience food, more late night snacking and a real spike in quick commerce as people restock without leaving the sofa build that split into your a daytime premium single serve occasion and a late night multipack bulk sharing one. So here is the whole thing in a single sentence. Winning the World cup is not about shouting the loudest. It is about knowing whether the event is even yours to win, capturing the demand before it disappears and knowing the difference between the spend that grows your brand and the spend that simply keeps you in the game. We pulled these lessons from the Acurus benchmark data across 44 categories, the last World cup, the €2024 and a great deal more. If you want the full breakdown, including exactly what to do before, during and after the event, the complete article is on our website. It is called how to Win the World Cup. You will find it at Accurus. Uh dot com. That's a C C U R I S dot com. That is it for this week. I am Mathilda and this has been FMCG M Weekly. See you next week.