For 59% of Poles, price is still the first factor they consider when shopping. Increasingly, however, consumers are also paying attention to product quality, health-related aspects and the brands behind the products, according to PwC’s report Taste, Price, Awareness: A Map of Polish Consumer Choices. Experts stress that brands need to tailor their products, values and pricing to the needs of different consumer groups while also building meaningful interaction with them.
“When making purchasing decisions, including in FMCG categories, consumers are constantly forced to balance tension and price. At the same time, through that price they are able to buy emotions, a sense of belonging, importance, or security that a given product provides. Different consumers are willing to spend different amounts of money in exchange for different emotions, and the producer’s role in this process is to properly match its products, their values and their price to the needs and emotions of the consumer,” Aleksandra Wierzba, Corporate Affairs Representative at PepsiCo Poland, told Newseria.
According to PwC Poland’s report, financial considerations remain the most important factor when choosing food products. This was indicated by 59% of consumers, while 43% pointed to promotional offers. At the same time, quality-focused consumers value taste (51%), nutritional value (26%) and trusted brands (27%).
“FMCG producers build consumer engagement, brand attachment and loyalty primarily through interaction with consumers. And these are two-way interactions – consumers do not expect a monologue from us, but a dialogue. They expect us to respond quickly and substantively to their questions on social media, to answer their phone calls asking, for example, about specific product features. It also requires creating the right opportunities for consumers to become involved in the brand’s marketing process, for example through contests, games or gamification of the entire sales process,” Aleksandra Wierzba explains.
According to the PwC report, nearly half of Polish consumers, 49%, would be willing to switch product brands because of better taste, while 45% would do so for a better quality-to-price ratio. Meanwhile, 7% of respondents said engaging digital content could persuade them to change their food brand.
“The role of influencers depends on the generation. Millennials trust their friends more and are less inclined to trust influencers or follow what they suggest to consumers on their profiles. Members of Generation Z, in most studies, are more likely to make a purchase based on an influencer’s opinion, but at the same time they also trust their friends and their recommendations regarding a product,” the PepsiCo Poland expert emphasizes.
Last year’s Wavemaker study, Influencers Under the Microscope: Ethics in Social Media, showed that consumers identified influencer marketing as one of the most persuasive communication channels, second only to television in terms of impact on purchasing decisions. As many as 72% of consumers said they had discovered a new brand through an influencer’s recommendation, while among Generation Z the figure reached 87%.
Influencers have a particularly strong impact on purchasing decisions in consumer product categories such as food, fashion and cosmetics, with consumers under the age of 35 being the most receptive to their recommendations.
“Brands decide to work with major influencers in order to demonstrate the strength of their reputation. They can afford to be associated with this kind of personality, whose role in social media is quite significant. When it comes to micro- and nano-influencers, contracts signed with them have a greater chance of affecting sales of a given product,” Aleksandra Wierzba says.
In the Santander Consumer Bank survey E-commerce Experiences, 36% of respondents admitted that product recommendations on social media influence their purchases. The largest group consisted of people aged 18–29, among whom 59% declared that they follow recommendations on these platforms. Slightly more than half of respondents said they most often rely on recommendations from people they know personally, 26% on an independent reviewer, 21% on another customer or user not connected with the brand, and 17% on an influencer specializing in a given field.
“For PepsiCo Poland, a very good example of an internet-driven trend was the moment when owners of kebab stands and restaurants started serving kebabs on Lay’s chips. We became part of a form of user-generated content in which we could really do nothing other than get involved, comment and interact both with the online creators presenting this trend and with the observers commenting on it, in order to show that as a brand we see what is happening and that we are part of pop culture and social media,” says the Corporate Affairs Representative at PepsiCo Poland.
