A new NielsenIQ global study found that 58% of consumers say they don't care whether they're buying a national brand or a private label product — they just want their needs met. For small and mid-sized FMCG businesses, that finding answers a question a lot of owners have been avoiding: is anyone actually loyal to your brand, or just to the shelf it happens to sit on? The honest answer, according to the data, is that brand loyalty hasn't disappeared. It's split in two — and most SME brands don't know which half of the market they're actually fighting for.

Most FMCG founders built their pricing on an assumption: customers pay more for their brand because they prefer it. NielsenIQ's new report, , produced with World Data Lab, says otherwise for a majority of shoppers. Alongside that 58% indifference figure, 69% of consumers now believe private label offers genuinely good value for money, and 67% of Gen Z shoppers rate private label as equal in quality to national brands. This isn't happening in a vacuum — FMCG prices have risen roughly 26% globally since 2021, and every one of those increases has pushed another slice of the market to stop assuming your logo means anything extra.

Here's the part most brand strategy conversations skip: this isn't a story about everyone trading down. NielsenIQ frames it as a polarisation — a smaller, more valuable group of shoppers still pays a premium, but only when they can name the specific reason. The brands in trouble aren't the ones who've lost loyal customers. They're the ones who never worked out they had two different audiences to begin with, and have been marketing to an average of both that doesn't actually exist.

Before you spend another dollar defending your price point, run what I call the Blind Shelf Test with your own product line:

1. Strip the label. Put your product next to the closest private label equivalent with both sets of branding covered. Ask ten real customers to pick, and ask why. If they can't tell the difference or can't explain a preference, price is now your only lever — and a retailer's own brand will always be able to beat you on price.

2. Name the reason, in one line. Not “trusted since 1995.” A specific, provable claim a customer can repeat to someone else: a shorter ingredient list, a faster result, a guarantee competitors won't make. If your team can't write that line in under ten seconds, your customers can't either.

3. Track the split. Segment your customer base into two groups: those who buy on promotion or price every time, and those who've paid full price more than twice in a row. Most SME FMCG businesses have never run this analysis. It tells you exactly how much of your revenue is actually loyalty-proof, and how much is one price cut away from a competitor's shelf.

“Kevin assists businesses to understand their 'Secret Sauce' and implements a strategy to grow the company's brand and in turn, business opportunities. His guidance and strategic advice is always well thought through and gets fantastic outcomes.”

— Gareth Bayliss, Sales Manager, The Icehouse

Most FMCG and consumer goods owners already sense that their brand story has gone soft. What stops them acting on it isn't insight — it's bandwidth. Segmenting a customer base, running a blind test, and rewriting a value proposition all take focused hours that get eaten by production runs, retailer negotiations, and the daily fires only the owner can put out. Without someone holding the deadline and the standard, “we should really look at our positioning” stays on the list for another quarter — and another round of price rises passes through with no defence prepared.

This is where an outside structure earns its place, not as a substitute for the work but as the reason it actually gets finished. The Simple-Growth System™ builds this kind of brand and pricing audit into a working cadence with clear milestones, rather than leaving it as a good intention competing with this week's invoices.

Not sure how much of your revenue would survive a private label price match? That's exactly the kind of gap the Simple-Growth System™ is built to close.