- On the same pack, the strongest brand charges 16% (coffee) to 122% (bar soap) more than the entry-level brand.
- Coca-Cola costs 22.5% more than Pepsi in the 2 L bottle and still shows up on 7.6 times as many receipts.
- For every 1 million cans, the price gap between Heineken and Brahma adds up to about R$2M in revenue.
- The biggest premiums come where the benefit is more perceived than functional: in personal care and premium beer, the strong brand charges close to double the base price, or more.
Brand value as a CFO sees it
In the personal care aisle of any supermarket, two 85 g bars of soap share the same shelf. They weigh the same, look much alike and do the same job, yet one rings up at R$1.98 and the other at R$4.39. Plenty of shoppers still reach for the pricier one without a second thought. That gap, repeated across millions of purchases, is what this study sets out to measure.
“Most valuable brands” rankings tend to treat brand equity as a PR figure, hard to connect to a company’s results. A CFO can’t book a ranking on the balance sheet, but does see the brand in the P&L every month, in the form of a price premium: how much more a shopper is willing to pay for the same physical product, in the same size and on the same shelf, simply because they trust the name. To measure it, we read 6.6 million fiscal receipts issued at points of sale across Brazil between January and April 2026 and compared, in seven categories, each brand’s median price on the best-selling pack.
The premium shows up in every category we looked at. From coffee to soap, the brand that charges most asks between 16% and 122% above the entry-level brand, always for the same product.
Beer helps translate those percentages into money. A can of Heineken and a can of Brahma hold the same 350 ml and cost about the same to produce, yet they ring up at R$5.79 and R$3.79 respectively. For every 1 million cans sold, that gap adds up to R$2M in incremental revenue, most of which goes straight to margin. Multiply it across the whole portfolio and all twelve months of the year, and “brand value” stops being an abstraction and becomes a concrete line on the income statement.
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- How media turns into price
- Beverages: soft drinks, beer and ready-to-drink juice
- Pantry and dairy: coffee, milk and yogurt
- Personal care, where the brand weighs most on price
- What the seven categories have in common
- How we measure, and what’s still in beta
How media turns into price
Why would anyone pay more for the same product? The most solid explanation comes from How Brands Grow, in which Byron Sharp shows that brands grow mainly through penetration, that is, by being bought by more people, more often. To get there they need two conditions, which the Índice HYPR laid out in To grow, a brand has to be remembered and be found: mental availability, meaning coming to mind at the moment of purchase, and physical availability, meaning being on sale, in the right variant and at the right price, wherever the shopper is. That study used the contest between Corona and Heineken for consumption moments as its example. This one looks at what that contest leaves at the register.
Media reaches the P&L along that path. Broad, continuous reach with consistent brand assets creates and refreshes the memories that tie a brand to consumption moments. The brands in this study offer clear examples: Ninho owns the “for my kids” moment, Protex owns “protection for the family,” and Coca-Cola is present in practically every soft-drink occasion. The financial effect of those memories follows a precise mechanism, one that starts before the shopper ever reaches the shelf.
The brand that comes to mind first gets compared less, because a shopper who has already decided in memory doesn’t hold a price auction at the shelf.
That mechanism reaches the bottom line in four ways.
- 01Price
The premium applies to every unit.
Since the cost of making the product doesn’t change, almost all of the extra price falls straight to gross margin.
- 02Elasticity
Strong brands pass on inflation with less damage.
When costs rise, they raise prices and lose less volume, while weak brands are left at the mercy of the retailer’s price list.
- 03Promotion
They depend less on discounts.
Turnover stays predictable without promotions, and every point of discount avoided is margin kept.
- 04Trade
They negotiate from a stronger position.
Shelf space and good commercial terms tend to go to the brands shoppers look for.
To see the mechanism in numbers, the next sections walk through the seven categories, starting with beverages.
Beverages: soft drinks, beer and ready-to-drink juice
Soft drinks, 2 L
This is the textbook case of brand equity. In the 2 L bottle, Coca-Cola costs 22.5% more than Pepsi and still shows up on 7.6 times as many receipts. You might expect the pricier brand to sell less, yet Coca-Cola pairs the highest price in the category with the widest penetration, a combination that usually takes decades of continuous media to build.
Base: 2.91 million receipts with a 2 L soft drink, Jan–Apr 2026. Median price per item; pack size extracted from the product description on the receipt.
Beer, 350 ml can
In beer, every brand comes in the same can. Heineken sells for R$5.79 what Itaipava sells for R$2.99, a 93.6% premium, while keeping volume on par with mainstream brands such as Brahma and Skol. It is the return on years of consistent assets, the same ones the availability study describes at the bar on game night: the red star, the green bottle and the Champions League.
Base: 1.18 million receipts with a 350 ml beer, Jan–Apr 2026.
Ready-to-drink juice, 200 ml
Ready-to-drink juice holds two different routes to brand strength. Yakult nearly doubles Maratá’s price for the same 200 ml (+96.1%), backed by a brand built around a single health moment and defended for 50 years. Del Valle takes the opposite route, with a moderate 30.6% premium over the base and the largest volume in the category.
Base: 316k receipts with a 200 ml ready-to-drink juice, Jan–Apr 2026.
Pantry and dairy: coffee, milk and yogurt
At first glance the pantry looks like commodity territory, where shoppers would always pick the lowest price. The receipts show that even on these shelves the brand still gets paid, in some cases generously.
Coffee, 500 g
Coffee is the closest thing to a commodity in this study, and even there the brand collects its share. Melitta holds R$33.65 on the pack Caboclo sells for R$28.90, a 16.4% premium per unit at an equivalent production cost. 3 Corações, for its part, leads on volume while charging more than the entry-level brands. The case shows that brand strength doesn’t always translate into the highest price; sometimes it shows up as the highest volume sold at a price weaker brands couldn’t sustain.
Base: 276k receipts with 500 g of coffee, Jan–Apr 2026.
Milk, 1 L
Milk is undifferentiated by definition, and Ninho manages to defy that rule. The brand charges R$6.49 for the liter Italac sells for R$4.89, 32.7% more, on the strength of the “for my kids” moment. The counterweight is volume, since Italac shows up on three times as many receipts. These are two legitimate P&L strategies, one built on margin per unit and the other on turnover, and the strong brand’s advantage is being able to choose the first without losing its place on the shelf.
Base: 1.38 million receipts with 1 L of milk, Jan–Apr 2026.
Yogurt, 170 g
On the 170 g cup, Danone charges R$4.29 where Serramar charges R$2.39, or 79.5% more. It is Nestlé, however, that shows the most valuable combination in the category, charging 67% over the base while leading on volume. In a quick, recurring purchase like this one, the habit of grabbing the same brand without thinking carries a value that turns, quite literally, into price.
Base: 245k receipts with a 170 g yogurt, Jan–Apr 2026.
Personal care, where the brand weighs most on price
The scene that opens this study belongs to this category. Protex costs 2.2 times as much as Flor de Ypê for the same 85 g bar and charges 37.6% more than even Nivea, the second most expensive. The physical product is practically identical; what shoppers take home is the promise of “protection for the family,” repeated for decades. In hygiene and personal care, price is set far more by perceived benefit than by the cost of inputs.
Base: 284k receipts with an 85 g bar of soap, Jan–Apr 2026.
What the seven categories have in common
Read together, the seven categories reveal three patterns that help explain when and why a brand can charge more.
- 01Benefit
The premium grows where the benefit is perceived.
In personal care and premium beer, the strong brand charges close to double the base price, or more. In coffee, a pantry category, the premium sits at 16%.
- 02Scale
Charging more doesn’t require being a niche.
Coca-Cola charges 22.5% more than Pepsi at 7.6 times the volume, and Nestlé leads yogurt on turnover while charging 67% over the base.
- 03Choice
Every category has a margin brand and a turnover brand.
Ninho, Yakult and Heineken sit on one side; Italac, Del Valle and Skol on the other. Only a strong brand gets to choose which side it wants to be on.
| Category | Pack | Comparison | Premium |
|---|---|---|---|
| Bar soap | 85 g | Protex vs. Flor de Ypê | +121.7% |
| Ready-to-drink juice | 200 ml | Yakult vs. Maratá | +96.1% |
| Beer | 350 ml | Heineken vs. Itaipava | +93.6% |
| Yogurt | 170 g | Danone vs. Serramar | +79.5% |
| Milk | 1 L | Ninho vs. Líder | +56.4% |
| Soft drinks | 2 L | Coca-Cola vs. Sukita | +55.9% |
| Coffee | 500 g | Melitta vs. Caboclo | +16.4% |
The price premium is the dividend a brand pays on its accumulated media investment, and it is credited to the P&L every month, receipt by receipt.
For anyone who sets budgets, the practical consequence is that brand investment can be tracked in the same place sales are tracked. Brand managers gain a metric that speaks the CFO’s language, and media planners gain a way to check, category by category, whether the memory a campaign builds is turning into price.
How we measure, and what’s still in beta
Source. The data comes from fiscal receipts and electronic invoices issued at points of sale across Brazil, read by revIQ, powered by Groundflow. Each record is a purchase that actually took place, which sets this reading apart from surveys built on stated intent.
Metric. We use the median price per item between January and April 2026. Pack size is extracted from the product description on the receipt, and within each category every brand is compared on the same pack, the best-selling one. That step removes the size-mix effect and isolates the premium that belongs to the brand.
Known limits. Price premium is only one component of brand strength, and the full index will add penetration, purchase frequency, resilience to promotions and breadth of consumption moments. Median price also doesn’t capture dispersion by region or channel, and brands with different propositions within the same category, such as a functional drink and a juice, should be read with that context in mind.