Why BOGO Is Dying, And What Works Instead
Three forces retired BOGO between 2014 and 2026. What to run in its place
For twenty years the buy-one-get-one was the default promotional mechanic in packaged goods. Three forces retired it between 2014 and 2026. Most commercial teams have not fully updated the calendar.
The slide that retired a default
September 2014, a Tesco board meeting. Dave Lewis, six weeks into his role as Chief Executive, was presenting his commercial reset. The Tesco share price had fallen hard that summer. A £263 million accounting mis-statement had just been disclosed. The new CEO needed a plan that shifted the business onto a more honest footing with shoppers and with its own Profit and Loss (P&L).¹
One slide in that presentation said something the room had not heard a Tesco CEO say in two decades. Cut roughly a third of the active promotional calendar. Pull most buy-one-get-one-free offers off the shelves. Replace them with everyday-lower prices and simpler targeted cuts. The programme got the plain name "Simpler, Long-Term Pricing".
Twelve years on, the consequences of that slide are still working through European grocery. Buy-one-get-one (BOGO), the default Fast-Moving Consumer Goods (FMCG) promotional format for roughly two decades, has been in steady retreat since 2014. Sainsbury's followed Tesco in 2016. Morrisons, Asda, and the hard-discount players built their offers without it in the first place. In October 2022 the United Kingdom's Food (Promotion and Placement) (England) Regulations 2021 came into force, restricting volume-price promotions on high-fat, sugar, and salt categories.² Ireland and France have brought in similar rules. Norway has moved further. The retreat is no longer voluntary.
Most commercial teams understand this at a high level. The calendar has not caught up. BOGO is still pitched as the default promotional move in brand plans, in trade review decks, and in "what should we run next quarter" conversations. This article is about why that default has stopped working, and what to put in its place.
Why BOGO won for twenty years
Any promotional mechanic that stays dominant for two decades is winning on multiple axes. BOGO's argument was a clean four-part case in the late 1990s and through the 2000s.
It was visible. A "buy one, get one free" flash on the shelf was the loudest signal any grocery aisle could carry. Brand recall during a BOGO week ran consistently higher than for any percentage-based cut of equivalent depth.
It was simple. A shopper reads "buy one, get one free" and knows what it means without doing pack-size arithmetic. The mental model matches how shoppers already think about "getting a deal".
It was retailer-friendly. Retailers liked the in-store drama. A wall of BOGO end-of-aisle displays drove footfall across categories, not just the promoted product. Category managers could negotiate co-funding and earn brand-side trade investment against the lift.
And it was easy to measure at the top line. Sales volume over the BOGO week was typically 2.5 to 4 times the normal baseline. That made promotional performance look great in the month-one review deck, before anybody ran the incrementality math.
Three forces that broke the math
Between 2014 and 2026, three different forces, none of them acting in concert, progressively broke the BOGO case.
The first was better incrementality data. Shopper loyalty-card panels at Tesco, Nielsen/Circana panels across the industry, and store-exit surveys commissioned by brands in the early 2010s all started pointing at the same uncomfortable finding. Between 60 and 80 percent of a BOGO's uplift was shoppers who were going to buy that brand anyway, just buying earlier or buying more.³ Only 20 to 40 percent was truly incremental, new shoppers or new consumption occasions. That ratio is where BOGOs fall apart economically, because loyal shoppers buying earlier just pulls demand forward and depresses the baseline for four to eight weeks after the promo window.
The second force was retailer strategy. Tesco in 2014 was the catalyst. Sainsbury's under Mike Coupe announced its own simpler-pricing move in 2016, cutting BOGO frequency and shifting to targeted loyalty-card offers through Nectar.⁴ Morrisons followed. Asda, under Walmart's everyday-low-price doctrine, had never been a heavy BOGO player anyway. By the end of 2018, the share of UK grocery promotional spend flowing through BOGO formats had roughly halved from its 2012 peak, based on trade-press estimates from Retail Week, The Grocer, and IGD.
The third force was regulation. The United Kingdom's Food (Promotion and Placement) (England) Regulations 2021 began commencing in October 2022 with in-store location restrictions on where retailers could place products classed as high in fat, salt, or sugar (HFSS). The volume-price restrictions on HFSS categories, which directly target BOGO-style multi-buys, followed through a phased rollout over the following years after multiple government delays.² Ireland introduced similar rules. France and Norway brought in related restrictions on specific categories. In 2026, a national grocer in the United Kingdom running a BOGO on biscuits, crisps, soft drinks, or most confectionery is either breaking the rules or working within a narrow exemption that is shrinking on review.
The incrementality problem, in practitioner terms
The incrementality finding is worth sitting with because it is the single most important reason to stop defaulting to BOGO.
Imagine you run a BOGO on your 300g hero pack over two weeks. Your normal weekly baseline at a top retailer is 1,000 packs. During the two-week BOGO window you sell 6,000 packs, a three-times lift. On paper that looks like 4,000 extra packs sold.
Loyalty-panel analysis of actual promotional data in the 2010s and 2020s consistently finds that of those 4,000 extra packs, roughly 2,600 were bought by shoppers who would have bought your brand in the following 6 to 8 weeks anyway. They just stocked up early and took the free pack home. Only around 1,400 packs represent genuinely incremental volume (new shoppers trying the brand, existing shoppers adding a new consumption occasion, or a switcher choosing you over the competitor).
The problem is that the stocked-up shoppers do not re-buy on their normal schedule. Your baseline for the following 6 to 8 weeks drops by roughly 10 to 20 percent as their pantry runs down. That dip more or less cancels out the "extra" packs you appeared to sell during the promo window. When you fold in the promo cost on all 6,000 promoted packs (half the per-pack revenue effectively goes to the shopper), the net incremental profit on the BOGO typically lands between a small loss and a small gain. Industry meta-analyses place the promotional Return on Investment (ROI) for the average BOGO in a range of minus 10 to plus 10 percent, net of hangover.³
A straight percentage cut does meaningfully better on exactly this ratio. The smaller stock-up signal (a pack becomes cheaper, not free-with-another) produces less pantry loading. Roughly 50 percent of the uplift is truly incremental rather than 35 percent. The per-pack margin hit is proportional and predictable rather than dropping to zero. Typical promo ROI for a well-structured 20 percent cut lands clearly positive, in the +5 to +25 percent range depending on category, margin, and depth of discount, a meaningful step up from BOGO on the same SKU at the same baseline.
What works instead
BOGO's retreat has not left a vacuum. Three replacement mechanics have taken most of the ground.
Straight percentage cuts (10 to 30 percent off shelf price for 2 to 4 weeks) are the new default across UK modern grocery. They work for roughly the same reasons BOGO worked (visible, simple, retailer-friendly) but without the zero-margin second unit and with smaller baseline hangover. Retailers like them because they fit cleanly inside the "simpler pricing" strategies Tesco and Sainsbury's adopted. Brands like them because Finance can model them.
Loyalty-personalised offers are where most of the BOGO budget has quietly moved. Tesco Clubcard Prices, Sainsbury's Nectar Prices, Morrisons More, Lidl Plus, and the Boots Advantage Card have each built surfaces that deliver shopper-specific discounts. The targeting efficiency is much higher than a blanket BOGO. The discount goes to shoppers whose purchase patterns suggest they would respond, not to every loyalist already standing in front of the shelf. Typical promo ROI for a well-targeted loyalty offer lands consistently above a shelf-wide price cut.
Structural everyday-lower pricing is a different answer to the same question. Aldi and Lidl have built their entire proposition around it: fewer promotions, lower shelf prices every week, simpler shopper mental models. Brand manufacturers working with these accounts rarely get to run a BOGO at all. The mechanic does not fit. The trade investment shows up as a lower wholesale rate instead, compounding into baseline share over years rather than spiking in promotional weeks.
The five questions to walk before you default to BOGO
The paired decision guide (the BOGO or Price Cut playbook linked at the end) walks you through this in a rubric. You can carry the practical version in your head. Ask yourself five short questions before committing your next promotional slot.
Is this a stock-up-able category? Biscuits, frozen, detergent, soft drinks, pet food: yes. Fresh, chilled, products shoppers only buy one of: no. If the answer is no, a BOGO is almost certainly the wrong choice because the shopper cannot use or store the second pack.
Does your market or retailer allow multi-buy on this Stock Keeping Unit (SKU)? If the SKU sits in a regulated high-fat, sugar, salt category in the UK, or in a retailer's own simpler-pricing exclusion list, the question stops here.
How much of the uplift will be truly incremental? If your category's loyalty data says less than 40 percent of BOGO uplift is genuinely new volume, the math will not work. This is the question that kills most BOGOs on paper.
Is the SKU margin high enough to absorb a near-zero-margin second unit? Below roughly 35 percent contribution margin, BOGO drops into territory where the manufacturer loses money on every second pack. A straight cut protects positive margin on every sale.
Does your retailer mix still reward flash with premium display? Some retailers do, most have moved on. Size your answer to the retailer, not to the brand.
If any of the first four questions answers no, use a straight cut. If all four pass and the retailer still rewards flash, BOGO can still be the right mechanic. It is a specialist tool now, not a default.
The point, and what to do Monday morning
BOGO's retreat is one of the cleaner signals available to a commercial team that the promotional default has shifted. A mainstream retailer with more data than any single brand has concluded it was destroying its own P&L. A national government has legislated it out of several product categories. Shoppers have got savvier and loyalty-card targeting has filled most of the old BOGO job better.
Monday morning, the practical move is to look at your next quarter's promotional plan and count how many slots still default to BOGO. For any slot where your category is not a clear stock-up-able winner with above-35-percent margin and a retailer that still rewards flash, replace the BOGO with a 20 percent cut, or with a loyalty-card-personalised offer if your top retailers have that surface. The likely promotional ROI gain on each swap is in the high single digits to low double digits. Across a full calendar that is worth the meeting.
Keep going:
- Walk the decision with a rubric and a worked example → Same five questions, presented as an interactive decision tree, with the biscuit-brand worked example from this article at the bottom.
- When matching a competitor's price cut destroys value → The sister decision on the pricing side of the same portfolio. Same narrative-plus-decision structure.
- Three metrics that reveal whether a promotion worked → Goes deeper on the incrementality question that quietly killed the BOGO default.
Take the ideas in this article further, inside RGM Academy's lessons:
Promotional ROI. The foundation lesson on how to measure whether a promotion paid for itself, net of pull-forward and baseline erosion. Why this matters for this article: Question 4 (margin) and the promo-ROI comparison chart in Fig 3 both come directly from the method this lesson teaches. → Start the lesson
Source of Volume. The incrementality question (how much of the uplift is truly new versus pulled-forward baseline) is the single most important number in the BOGO decision. This lesson walks through how to decompose a promotional week's volume into new shoppers, pulled-forward baseline, and pack-trade-up. → Start the lesson
Promotional Mechanics. A deeper tour of the promotional-mechanic taxonomy: BOGO, percentage cut, fixed-price bundle, loyalty-personalised offer, in-store flash. The lesson walks through when each mechanic wins and the operational trade-offs. → Start the lesson
Performance Grid. Maps your promotional portfolio onto an Incrementality by ROI grid and flags the BOGOs (or any other mechanic) that are structurally in the Stop quadrant. The most operational lesson for cleaning up a bloated promotional calendar. → Start the lesson
References
- Tesco shares fall as new chief Dave Lewis briefs board on reset, Reuters, 23 September 2014; Tesco suspends four executives amid £263 million accounting probe, The Guardian, 29 September 2014. Tesco Annual Report 2014/15, "Strategic Report: Simpler Pricing".
- UK Government, The Food (Promotion and Placement) (England) Regulations 2021, statutory instrument 2021/1368, https://www.legislation.gov.uk/uksi/2021/1368/contents. Volume-price restrictions on HFSS categories commenced through phased implementation after multiple delays; location restrictions took effect on 1 October 2022.
- Industry promotional incrementality research is discussed across several published bodies: Bijmolt, van Heerde, and Pieters, New Empirical Generalizations on the Determinants of Price Elasticity, Journal of Marketing Research, Vol. 42, No. 2, May 2005, https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1509/jmkr.42.2.141.62292; Rao, Bergen, and Davis, How to Fight a Price War, Harvard Business Review, March 2000, https://hbr.org/2000/03/how-to-fight-a-price-war. NielsenIQ and Circana regular industry reports update the figures on an ongoing basis.
- Sainsbury's announcement of its simpler-pricing initiative in 2016 was covered by Retail Week and The Grocer at the time; Mike Coupe's public statements on the shift away from multi-buys are documented in Sainsbury's Annual Report 2016/17.