Part II, The Mechanics · Chapter 10

Loaders

Multibuys, bundles and gift with purchase: how to grow the basket without just filling the pantry

Cereal for dinner

In February 2024 the chief executive of WK Kellogg Co, the cereal business Kellogg’s had spun off a few months earlier, went on American business television and suggested that families feeling the cost of living could eat cereal for dinner. A bowl with milk and fruit, he said, cost less than a dollar, and more than a quarter of cereal was already eaten outside breakfast. The company was advertising the idea. The reaction was immediate and mostly unkind. The comments called him out of touch, and the phrase people reached for was “let them eat cake”.

It is easy to laugh, and most of the internet did. But underneath the clumsy timing was a real problem, and it is the problem of this chapter. Kellogg’s sells a great deal of cereal. Most households that eat cereal for breakfast already buy it. If the company wants people to buy more, it cannot simply put more boxes in their trolleys, because the boxes will sit in the pantry until the old ones run out, and next month’s sales will be this month’s sales eaten slowly. The only way a lead brand sells more of something people already buy is to get them to use more of it. For cereal, that means another meal.

Every brand leader in a mature category knows this conversation. The breakfast people try to find a second eating occasion. The laundry people would like everyone to get a little dirtier, and Unilever’s Dirt is Good, which has been telling parents since 2005 that children who come home muddy are children who have played properly, is at the very least a detergent brand making a warm case for more washing. These are long, expensive, brand-building jobs. A promotion cannot do them on its own. But a promotion can do the opposite of them very easily, and very often does.

The pantry problem: why multibuys often borrow next week’s sales

Run a two-for-one on a staple and the sales chart does something gratifying: it jumps. The question every Loader has to answer is where the jump came from.

There is good research on this, and it is more encouraging than the pessimists say and less than the optimists hope. In 2004 Harald van Heerde, Peter Leeflang and Dick Wittink took four sets of store sales data and split the promotional bump into its parts. On average, about a third came from other brands: shoppers switching. About a third was borrowed from other weeks: people buying earlier or buying more and then not buying again for a while. And about a third was new demand for the category, from other stores or from people using more. An earlier paper by van Heerde with Sachin Gupta and Dick Wittink made the same point in its title, “Is 75% of the sales promotion bump due to brand switching? No, only 33% is.”

Read that as a brand leader and it is sobering. If you already hold most of the category, the switching third is smaller for you, because there are fewer other brands’ buyers to switch. The borrowed third is mostly your own customers paying you early. Only the last third is the shopper really using more, and that third depends on the category. People with more yoghurt in the fridge tend to eat more yoghurt; Kusum Ailawadi and Scott Neslin showed as much in 1998. Few people put more tomato sauce on their pies because there are four bottles in the cupboard.

So the larder-filling deal has a recognisable shape. A spike during the promotion. A trough after it, as the pantry empties at its normal pace. A retailer who has learned that the brand will be on deal again soon, and a shopper who has learned to wait for it. The sales were real; the growth was mostly a loan.

Two kinds of basket

Not every Loader has this problem, and it helps to separate the two kinds of basket before designing anything.

In durables the basket is a one-off. Nobody stockpiles washing machines. When chapter 2’s kitchen cashback asked a buyer to turn one steam oven into three appliances in one transaction, or chapter 1’s laundry offer rewarded a washer and dryer bought together, the extra item was not borrowed from next month. It was a sale that would otherwise have gone to another brand, or another year, or not happened. Durables Loaders live on the rule chapter 2 gave them: the reward has to feel worth more than the cost of the trade-up, and the threshold has to be one a real shopper can reach on a real trip.

In the grocery aisle the basket goes into a pantry, and the pantry problem applies. Here the question is not “will they buy more today?” They will, if the deal is good enough. The question is whether today’s extra purchase is still extra a month from now.

Four ways to load a basket that stays loaded

Over the years we have come to think there are only four honest ways for a Loader to add sales that do not come back to bite, and the brief should name which one it is using.

Grow consumption. Only possible where use is flexible: snacks, drinks, yoghurt, things eaten because they are there. A multibuy on these can raise consumption, provided the product is visible and easy to reach at home. For a lead brand in a fixed-use category it is the cereal-for-dinner problem, and a promotion alone will not solve it; it needs a new occasion that feels like a gift to the shopper, not a need of the company’s.

Add what was not there. The best Loaders put a second product in the basket, not a second unit of the first. The dip with the chips, the tonic with the gin, the dryer with the washer. The shopper buys something they would not have bought, and the extra does not sit in the pantry waiting to replace next week’s purchase. This usually needs a partner, another brand or the retailer, which is a Venue conversation before it is a design one.

Trade up. A bigger size, a better range, the premium version. The basket grows in value rather than in units, and the shopper’s next purchase may stay at the new level. Spend thresholds and gifts with purchase are the usual tools, and both are covered below.

Fill the competitor’s space. For a challenger brand, pantry loading is not the same problem. A household with your product stacked in the cupboard is a household out of the market for everyone else for a few weeks, and some of those weeks are weeks the leader would have had. This is the one case where larder filling is the point, and it works best for brands whose buyers switch back and forth anyway.

Spend thresholds: where to set the bar

Spend thirty dollars, get one miniature. Spend twenty-five on Jim Beam, enter the draw. The spend threshold is the most common Loader in Australian retail, and most of its failures come from one decision: where the bar sits.

Set it at or below what people already spend and it rewards the basket they were going to buy anyway. Set it far above and only the people who were already big spenders reach it. The useful place is just above the typical basket for the shopper you are trying to move, close enough that one more item gets them there. That means knowing the typical basket before launch, which for a brand usually means asking the retailer. Promo-Monitor’s guide to briefs, quoted in chapters 8 and 9, puts the practical half of this in a line: “Set the threshold to stretch the basket, and make sure the retailer’s systems can recognise it.” A threshold the checkout cannot see is a threshold that has to be proved later with a receipt, and that is friction placed after the decision, which is fine, as long as everyone has planned for it.

Gift with purchase: the reward that makes room for more

A gift with purchase is a Loader with a particular advantage: the reward can be chosen to grow consumption after the promotion ends.

In May and June 2026 Penfolds offered a Grand Cru wine fridge, valued at $1,999, to people who spent $2,000 or more on Penfolds, Grange included. There were 725 of them. Set aside how generous that is and look at what the reward does. A wine fridge is a box built to hold wine. It turns a single large purchase into a cellar, and a cellar into a reason to keep buying to fill the gaps. The gift loads the basket today and makes room in the house for the next basket.

Most gifts with purchase are chosen for perceived value, and that is half the job. The other half is asking what the gift does at home. The cocktail kit that needs the spirit, the glasses that suit the wine, the cooler bag that comes out every weekend with the brand inside it: these are rewards that work on consumption, and they are what separate a Loader that lasts from a Loader that borrows.

How to measure a basket promotion

Ruling R11 says the job sets the scoreboard. For a Loader the scoreboard is not units during the promotion. It is units, or value, across the whole cycle: the weeks of the promotion and the weeks after it, compared with the same stretch without it. A Loader that sells a great deal in four weeks and gives most of it back in the next six has not loaded anything; it has rearranged the calendar.

For a brand, those numbers live in its own sales data and in retailer loyalty data: units per buyer, value per basket, and, most telling, the size of the trough after the end. For a durables Loader, the number is simpler, the attachment rate, how many buyers of the first product also bought the second. What the promotion itself can see is narrower: the claims or entries that met the threshold, which are purchases the promotion can see and nothing more.

Where this leaves the brief

A basket brief usually arrives as “we want them to buy more”, and the first question back should be: more of what, and used when? If the answer is more of the same thing, used at the same pace, the promotion is borrowing from next month, and it is worth saying so before the plan is signed rather than after the trough arrives. If the answer is a second product, a better version, a new occasion or the competitor’s cupboard space, there is a Loader to build: a threshold set just above the real basket, a reward that clears the cost of the trade-up, and, where possible, a gift that keeps working at home.

A Loader fills the trolley. The next chapter is about what a promotion can learn about the person pushing it.