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How Brand Footprint is built

Brand Footprint measures how often people choose a brand rather than how much they spend on it, and that distinction shapes everything on this page.

What follows sets out what a Consumer Reach Point is, how it is calculated, which brands and categories qualify, and where the underlying data comes from.

It is a working summary rather than a technical specification. The full detail sits in the global report.

What we're actually counting

One Consumer Reach Point is a single instance of a household choosing a brand, so it records a decision rather than a sum of money. A household that buys a brand twelve times in a year generates twelve Consumer Reach Points, and a household that buys it once generates one.

Counting decisions rather than value has two consequences worth understanding. A brand cannot climb the ranking by raising its prices, because the count does not move when the price does. And a wealthy market does not outrank a poorer one simply for being wealthy, which is what allows 58 markets with very different incomes and basket sizes to sit in the same table and mean the same thing.

How a CRP is calculated

The calculation multiplies three numbers together:

  • Population: the number of households in the market
  • Penetration: the share of those households buying the brand at least once in the year
  • Consumer choice: how often, on average, a buying household chose it across the categories it competes in

So a market of 20 million households, where 40% buy a brand and each buyer chooses it eight times a year, produces 64 million Consumer Reach Points.

Frequency is counted across every category the brand sells into, so a brand present in several aisles accumulates choices from all of them. The calculation runs for each brand in each market separately, and the market results are then added together rather than averaged, so larger populations carry more weight.

How brand size is defined

Small brand

Penetration of 10% or less

Mid-size brand

Penetration above 10% and up to 30%

Large brand

Penetration above 30%

At Worldpanel we welcome questions about our data.

For anything relating to the methodology, please contact:

David Chapman
Senior Manager, Global Insight-led Content and Thought Leadership, at [email protected]

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The classification matters when reading growth rates, because the three groups do not face the same odds. In 2024, 60% of small brands grew their Consumer Reach Points, against 52% of mid-size brands and 44% of large ones.

A small brand has more households left to win, whereas a large brand has to replace the shoppers it loses each year before it can add a single new one, which is why its growth tends to look modest next to a challenger's.

Where the data comes from

The 2026 edition covers purchases made during 2025. It spans 58 markets and 30,000 brands, and those markets account for over 85% of global GDP.

Most of the data comes from Worldpanel by Numerator's continuous purchase panels. Participating households record everything they bring into the home, week after week, which makes it possible to follow the same households' decisions over time rather than estimate them from sales data.

Worldpanel covers more than 65 markets in total including our important partners, Europanel and YouGov. The ranking universe is the smaller figure, and the two have been used interchangeably in the past.

Reading the numbers year on year

Panels are improved and historic data restated as coverage changes, so a figure published this year may differ slightly from the same figure published last year. The current edition is always the most accurate version of the series, and it is the one to quote.

The practical consequence is that comparisons are safest within a single edition. The rank movement and growth columns in this year's tables already compare like with like, because both years have been calculated on the same basis. A 2026 figure set against one taken from the 2025 report may not.

Where a national team changes its own inclusion rules, the country report says so. France recalculated its history this year to cover brands at one penetration point or above, having previously used 0.4.