Product of the Year drives sales

Research shows power of the Product of the Year in the UK

A new report from Market Research company TNS shows that winning Product of the Year can have a dramatic impact on the sales of a new product.

Key findings were:
- the average new product has sales of under £1m
- shortlisted Product of the Year products average £2.5m
- winners  of Product of the Year average first year sales of £12m

Peter Kneale of TNS said: “The correlation of average beating sales and Product of the Year is extremely strong”.

Through TNS Worldpanel, TNS accurately measures who buys which products when and from where. In so doing they are able to identify when a new product first makes it into the shopping basket and what it ends up achieving in terms of sales.

So, looking across the literally thousands of new products that are introduced every year it transpired that, on average, first year retail sales do not reach £1m. For most working for major consumer good manufacturers, that is probably not a particularly inspiring figure.

We wanted to find out if the Product of the Year logo (conferring the seal of approval from the British public) helped place a brand among the real stars of the FMCG industry?

To find out, we looked at 10 categories from Product of the Year 2005 and looked at the sales of all 50 products in these 10 categories for the 12 month period running up to November 2005.

So what did we find? To recap, the average new product won’t see sales get above the magic £1m mark.

What about the 2005 Finalists, those that got the nod from the Product of the Year jury but didn’t win the consumer vote? Well on average, those 40 products reached sales of around £2.75m, or about three times the level of an average new product. So getting through the jury stage is in itself a good endorsement of a new product’s credentials.

And what about the winners of those 10 categories? The products that were voted the most appealing ideas and the most satisfying to use in each category. Well we were extremely please to find that on average these products had sales of around £12m. That places them in the top 1-2% of products launched in Britain.

So to win Product of the Year really is a powerful endorsement from the UK public. The twelve and a half thousand people who voted didn’t just vote for these winners. They, and people like them up and down the country, went out and bought these products in their millions.

Peter Kneale
Director TNS

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