Incrementality has multiple meanings depending on the context.
- For promotions, incremental sales are the additional sales attributed to the promotion; they’re the opposite of base sales, which are essentially “what a brand would have sold anyway” during that promotional time period. Say an ice cream consumer goes to a store to buy 1 pint of ice cream, and sees it is on promotion, so they decide to buy 2 pints. That is tracked as 1 base unit sale and 1 incremental unit sale.
- In sell stories, brands want to convey that their products will add incremental growth to the set – i.e., they will attract buyers who are not currently purchasing these items instead of cannibalizing the sales of another brand. This is difficult to concretely prove unless you are using consumer panel data in your sell story.
