How Savencia Predicts Growth and Wins Mental Market Share with quantilope

This case study explores how Savencia utilizes quantilope’s Consumer Intelligence Platform and Better Brand Health Tracking framework to capture real-time category insights, optimize campaigns, and drive measurable business growth across its portfolio of dairy and cheese brands.

Savencia is a leading French-based global dairy provider specializing in premium cheeses and dairy products. Driven by strong core values and a company-wide mission of "Leading the way to better food," Savencia oversees a diverse group of beloved brands including Géramont, Brunch, Fol Epi, Tartare, alouette, and Caprice des Dieux.

To stay ahead in the fast-moving, highly competitive dairy category, Savencia became an early adopter of quantilope’s Better Brand Health framework—a modernized methodology from the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute that looks beyond the traditional brand funnel to evaluate Physical and Mental Availability. Mental Availability is the likelihood of your brand coming to mind in specific buying scenarios (and those specific scenarios are known as Category Entry Points).

To scale this approach across multiple brands, Savencia partners with quantilope, leveraging its automated platform to identify Category Entry Points (CEPs), track Mental Availability metrics in real time, and translate data into business actions.

Table of Contents:

• Moving beyond the traditional brand funnel
• Speed, AI, and automated Category Entry Points
• Connecting Mental Availability to real business outcomes
• Driving action through collaborative activation workshops
• quantilope x Savencia: partners in modernized innovation

Moving beyond the traditional brand funnel

Operating across diverse cheese categories—from soft cheeses and spreads to specialty cuts—Savencia recognized that legacy brand tracking models focused solely on funnel awareness were no longer sufficient. To truly win on the shelf and in consumers’ minds, the brand needed to understand the specific buying situations, motivations, and occasions that lead consumers to purchase within their category.

By adopting Byron Sharp's How Brands Grow philosophy and Jenni Romaniuk’s Better Brand Health framework through quantilope’s automated platform, Savencia measures two critical pillars of brand growth: Physical Availability (shelf presence, distribution, visibility) and Mental Availability (how easily a brand comes to mind in a buying situation).

Mental Availability takes place before you even go to the grocery store. It's about connecting your brand's unique reasons, needs, and motivations to specific buying situations.

— Elisabeth Schinke, Sr. Client Development Manager at quantilope

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Speed, AI, and automated Category Entry Points

To operationalize the Better Brand Health framework, Savencia relies on quantilope's platform automation and integrated AI capabilities.

To establish Category Entry Points (CEPs)—the mental cues that prompt a purchase, such as "for the whole family," "for a quick snack," or "while preparing an at-home meal,"—Savencia uses quantilope's CEP Generator. The generator comes up with an initial list — starting with 50 AI-generated CEPs and narrowing them down to a final list of 20, streamlining what used to be a lengthy brainstorming process. 

When we want to sell our products, we have to understand the motivations, needs, and occasions why consumers do what they do. This was the link to Category Entry Points. We can start our tracker and days later we have a fully populated dashboard with all key results to steer our communications and product launches with Category Entry Points.

After six years of partnership and over 120 research projects on the platform, the beauty is that marketers can simply ask quinn to 'Give me all insights from the last six years for Brunch,' and you get a complete presentation report back in minutes.

— Frank Hofmann, Sr. Consumer Insights Manager at Savencia

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Connecting Mental Availability to real business outcomes

For Savencia, tracking Mental Market Share and Mental Penetration (two key Mental Availability metrics) isn't just an academic exercise; it’s a direct guiding tool for commercial strategy. The team uses flexible tracking to align research waves with media campaigns for real-time market insights, running eight distinct brand trackers across multiple cheese categories.

By analyzing historical platform data alongside actual sales metrics, Savencia confirmed a strong correlation between rising Mental Penetration and future market growth.

We see Mental Penetration rising in the data, and believe me, 4-6 months later we see something. That is why we are doing this: to generate insights, use one language across teams, and raise our sales volumes.”

— Frank Hofmann, Sr. Consumer Insights Manager at Savencia

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Driving action through collaborative activation workshops

Data is only as valuable as the action it inspires. To prevent insights from getting buried in static slide decks, Savencia turns every quantilope tracking report into a cross-functional Activation Workshop.

These workshops bring together internal brand managers, media planners, and leadership, alongside key external partners and agencies. Because quantilope’s automated dashboards present complex statistical data in clean, visual charts, every stakeholder easily grasps brand strengths, weaknesses, and competitive whitespaces.

When we have the results ready, marketing calls me right away asking, 'Are the dashboards ready?' We bring everyone into a workshop—Savencia teams, quantilope, and our agencies. We look at the data, see our strengths against competitors or private labels, and make decisions to adjust our media spend, packaging, or messaging. Most importantly, everyone in the room is speaking one language.

— Frank Hofmann, Sr. Consumer Insights Manager at Savencia

quantilope x Savencia: partners in modernized innovation

For a global business managing a wide "house of brands," flexibility, efficiency, and methodological rigor are essential. Through its six-year partnership with quantilope, Savencia has successfully scaled the Better Brand Health framework across its portfolio, transforming consumer insights from a retrospective reporting function into a proactive growth engine.

Supported by dedicated quantilope research consultants and an always-on AI Research Partner (quinn), Savencia seamlessly combines automated advanced methodologies with real-time category tracking, ensuring every brand in its portfolio stays top-of-mind for consumers and ahead of the competition.