Measuring sales performance is usually the basis for any further analysis of your brand. Although it may seem overwhelming, it’s quite easy to get a brief idea of your brand’s sales. This can be done by narrowing your focus to three important metrics: value sales, volume sales, and unit sales.   

Value sales equal the amount of money that a brand makes by selling its products. Volume sales also focus on how much a brand has sold, however, it is expressed in a common unit relevant to the category (for example liters or kilograms). Unit sales are literally the number of items that a brand has sold.

Value sales are the most commonly used metric of these three. It captures what consumers are spending on your brand, but it doesn’t really capture what they are buying. Confused? It’s simple. Trends in value may cover up what’s really happening from a consumer perspective. Imagine seeing your value sales going up: Is this because your prices have gone up? Or is it because people started to buy more of your brand? Or did they start buying different types of packaging? To get insight into such matters, you’ll need to combine your value sales metric with other metrics. This is exactly where the volume sales and unit sales metrics come in handy.

The next example illustrates how working with these different metrics helps to understand a brand’s strategy. In the figure below we see three FMCG brands and their performance in the value sales (euros), volume sales (kilograms), and unit sales metrics. The bars represent their growth percentage, 2019 vs 2018.

So what do we see here? Although all three brands have grown in value, their strategy to achieve this has been very different. Let’s have a look at each brand separately.

• Brand A: The brand sold fewer units (-2%), but at the same time sold more kilograms (+7%) and earned more money (+10%). The brand obviously increased its price per unit to achieve such growth. The increase in volume (kg) can be explained by a shift to bigger packs and/or multi-packs that drove their sales in this period.

• Brand B: The brand sold fewer kilograms (-1%), but has a remarkable increase in euros (+7%) and units sold (+5%). This is a nice example of a brand that used a downsizing strategy, offering smaller products for the same price.

• Brand C: The brand earned more money (+4%), but sold fewer units (-1%) as well as kilograms (-2%). The value growth of this brand is driven by higher pricing while maintaining the same package size.

The example above demonstrates that it is important to analyze these metrics together. Just these three metrics can already help you understand what drives your brand in comparison to your competitors. On a higher level, it can help you identify trends in pricing and types of packaging on the market. This information is valuable for optimizing your brand’s current offering, just as it is for future innovations.