Master Kong is China’s favourite FMCG brand

Master Kong has a penetration rate of 91% in mainland China, according to the latest study by Kantar Worldpanel. The popularity of the beverage and instant food distributor is followed by dairy companies Mengniu with 88% and Yili with 86%. All three brands were chosen more than one billion times in 2012Globally Coca-Cola was named most popular FMCG brand: it was chosen nearly 5.3 billion times and boasts a penetrate rate of 43.9% of households around the world. Closely tailgating is Colgate, which was chosen 33 billion times with a penetration rate of 65.4%.Though availability in emerging markets remain a challenge for many global brands  – which is why many of them, like Heinz and Nestle, choose to acquire local brands – emerging markets actually contribute to the growth of more than half of the brands on the top 10 list.Coca-Cola, for example, increased its growth in these territories by 7%, which translates to 230million consumer reach points."As the pressure to maintain and increase growth intensifies, brand consumer base expansion and significant increase in loyalty are more critical than ever,” said Jason Yu, general Manager of Kantar Worldpanel China.“Until now, brands have lacked more in-depth analysis of their current basket reach compared to their competitors and opportunities for growth around the world. In China, there are many local brands with an enormous 'footprint' in terms of the number of households they reach and frequency of purchase.The study surveyed the most chosen FMCG brands across 32 countries in four continents comprising 823m households. It then looks at how many households purchased a brand at least once in 2012 (penetration) and the average number of times households bought the brand (frequency).