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Pakistan’s Brand Loyalty Index Study

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Ruhayl Rehmani April 2, 2026

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Pakistan has no official Brand Loyalty Index. No YouGov BrandIndex. No Kantar BrandZ Pakistan edition. No nationally published, annually updated instrument that tells marketers which brands are actually winning repeat purchase, emotional attachment, and switching resistance across the country’s 240 million consumers.

What exists instead is a fragmented picture assembled from a Nielsen consumer survey dating to 2011, Euromonitor category reports behind paywalls, PTA subscriber counts that conflate SIM ownership with loyalty, and editorial consensus built on top of all three. Every agency brief, investor deck, and brand strategy in Pakistan is working from the same incomplete intelligence stack.

The Editorial team of Madzine and I are attempting to build this picture, which is composite, transparent about its sources, and honest about where the data ends and inference begins.

The Top 10: Pakistan’s Highest-Loyalty Brands

Ranked across five criterions i.e., consumer preference, market share, household penetration, repeat purchase behaviour, and cultural embeddedness, these are the brands commanding the deepest loyalty in the Pakistani market as of 2024–25.

The split is 6 MNCs versus 4 local brands. That ratio is not accidental; it reflects where Pakistani consumers extend trust based on quality perception, they cannot easily verify themselves (FMCG, electronics, automotive), versus where cultural resonance and perceived value anchor repeat purchase regardless of multinational spend (tea, fashion, banking, appliances).

One finding that gave the team pause: the spices and masala category does not appear in the overall top 10. For a country where masala is not a product category but a cultural institution, that absence warrants explanation. The category earns a position in the top 15, ranked approximately 11th on the composite index, but is displaced from the top 10 by a single structural factor: the branded segment represents only 40% of total spice consumption in Pakistan, with unbranded loose spices controlling the remaining 60%. Loyalty, by definition, requires a brand to be loyal to. The category has the emotional intensity, but not yet the branded penetration to compete with the verticals above it.

The Scoring Methodology

The composite index applies five conditions at differentiated weights. Here is what each criterion measures, what source backs it, and what the data actually shows.

1. Consumer Brand Preference and Aided Recall (35%)

Source: Nielsen Pakistan, Campaign Asia (2011); OICCI Business Confidence Index 2024; Pakistan & Gulf Economist brand analysis, April 2025.

The Nielsen Company conducted face-to-face consumer interviews across 22 cities in all four provinces between March 16 and April 1, 2011. It remains the most methodologically rigorous publicly available brand preference study for Pakistan. Seven of the top ten brands identified in that study came from the FMCG sector. Seven of the ten were multinational companies. HBL ranked as the favourite financial institution. Pepsi led the beverages category.

The OICCI Business Confidence Index, published in December 2024, recorded a 20% improvement over 2023, signaling improving consumer sentiment as a contextual factor, not a direct brand measure.

The problem: The Nielsen study is 13 years old. No equivalent nationally representative, multi-category brand preference study has been published in Pakistan since. Every ranking that cites “Pakistani consumer preference” is, in most cases, citing this same 2011 dataset or editorial extrapolations from it.

2. Market Share and Category Leadership (25%)

Sources: Euromonitor Pakistan market reports 2024; Pakistan Telecommunication Authority (PTA) subscriber data; PCMI e-commerce data 2024.

Hard numbers available from this criterion:

• Telenor Pakistan: approximately 46 million subscribers (PTA 2024)¹
• Jazz: 40 million+ subscribers (PTA 2024) ¹
• Daraz: $876 million in online revenue in 2024 (PCMI E-Commerce Data Library)
• Pakistan FMCG sector: projected at $16 billion by 2025, growing at 9% annually (Unilever Pakistan / CEO Weekly, February 2025)
• Pepsi / PepsiCo: holds Mountain Dew and 7-Up in addition to Pepsi. Controls multiple top-five positions in the carbonated soft drink category
• Nestlé Milkpak: leads packaged milk; Nestlé Pakistan also leads RTD coffee through Nescafé (Euromonitor 2024)
• Lipton: leads RTD tea by volume as a Unilever sub-brand (Euromonitor 2024)

¹ PTA subscriber counts measure active SIMs, not loyal users. Pakistan has one of the highest dual-SIM usage rates in Asia. A consumer holding two SIMs, e.g., Jazz for data and Telenor for calls, appears on both operators’ loyalty base. Subscriber count is a penetration metric, not a loyalty one.

3. Household Penetration and Distribution Reach (20%)

Sources: Unilever Pakistan corporate statements; OICCI membership data; Nestlé Pakistan / joint MNC sustainability commitments; Nielsen category data (2011, cross-referenced with Euromonitor 2024).

• Unilever Pakistan claims near-universal household reach across SEC A through D for its combined portfolio, including Lux, Surf Excel, Lipton, Dove, and Sunsilk. The FMCG market intelligence unit at OICCI, of which Unilever Pakistan is a core member, confirmed this positioning in its 2024 investment confidence report.
• Nestlé, Coca-Cola, and Unilever jointly committed $250 million to dairy sustainability programs in Pakistan (CEO Weekly, February 2025), a signal of long-term distribution infrastructure investment.
• Dawlance consistently ranks as the number one home appliance brand by household ownership in Nielsen and Euromonitor category data.
• Sooper (English Biscuit Manufacturers) ranked as the number one biscuit brand by penetration in the Nielsen Pakistan study, ahead of Bakeri (Continental Biscuits Limited).

4. Repeat Purchase Behaviour and Switching Cost (12%)

Sources: Euromonitor category tracking 2024; automotive industry resale data; banking sector churn indicators; 1st Step footwear industry analysis 2024.

• Toyota holds the highest resale value retention in the Pakistani automotive market. A structural loyalty driver that competitors cannot match purely through marketing.
• Metro Shoes customers are cited in retail industry analysis as demonstrating brand-exclusive purchase behaviour: consumers who buy Metro do not substitute other brands. (1st Step Shoes industry blog, August 2024)
• Meezan Bank is the fastest-growing bank in Pakistan by active account acquisition. Though the Islamic banking segment carries structurally low churn, consumers who migrate to sharia-compliant banking rarely reverse the decision.
• JazzCash holds the largest active mobile wallet base in Pakistan. Its switching cost is amplified by merchant network effects: a consumer who’s local kiryana store accepts JazzCash has a practical barrier to moving to a competing wallet.
• Khaadi demonstrates the strongest repeat purchase loyalty within the fashion vertical. It’s consistent across Euromonitor’s fashion retail tracking and editorial consensus across multiple trade publications.

5. Cultural Embeddedness and Qualitative Trust Signal (8%)

Sources: Pakistan & Gulf Economist, April 2025; Euromonitor editorial synthesis 2024; cross-source editorial consensus.

This is the index’s explicit qualitative criterion. It measures what market share does not: the degree to which a brand has become part of how Pakistanis understand themselves, their households, and their daily rituals.

• Tapal manages to stay ahead of Lipton in the tea category, even though Lipton spends more on marketing. What really sets Tapal apart is how strongly it owns the idea of proper desi chai. From its Karachi roots to its working-class appeal and familiar, authentic taste, the positioning feels earned. That kind of brand space cannot be bought through a bigger ad budget. Lipton may win on volume through Unilever’s distribution network, but Tapal has the edge where it matters more, genuine loyalty built on cultural connection.
• Dawlance is often referred to as a “generational brand” across editorial and retail sources. It’s a true household name, to the point where “Dawlance” is used interchangeably with the word refrigerator itself in many Pakistani homes.
• Panadol (GSK Pakistan) effectively serves as the default choice for pain relief in the country, regardless of competition from generics. The trust it commands runs on three levels: medical credibility, family familiarity, and long-standing habit. That kind of loyalty isn’t something advertising can replace overnight.
• HBL carries a national identity dimension that no other bank in Pakistan replicates. Its heritage, its scale, and its association with Pakistani institutions across 75+ years give it a loyalty floor that pure service quality metrics miss.

Top 3 Brands by Major Vertical

What the Numbers Don’t Tell You

Three distortions are embedded in every Pakistan brand ranking that practitioners should account for.

Volume is not loyalty. Market share measures how many units were moved. Brand loyalty measures how many consumers would refuse to switch if a competitor offered them the same product at a lower price. Pakistan’s brand intelligence landscape almost entirely measures the former while claiming to measure the latter.

Subscriber count is not a preference. Telecom rankings in this index, and in most others in Pakistan, are based on PTA subscriber data, which simply counts active SIMs. In a market where dual-SIM usage is the norm, figures like 46 million for Telenor or 40 million for Jazz say more about distribution reach and pricing than about real loyalty. What actually drives loyalty in this category is network quality, customer service, and digital wallet integration, with JazzCash being a key differentiator. The problem is that none of these factors are measured at scale in publicly available Pakistani data.

The 2011 problem. The most cited primary consumer preference study for Pakistan is 13 years old. The country had a population of approximately 180 million in 2011. It has 240 million today. The median age has shifted. Digital and fintech categories did not exist in any meaningful form. E-commerce was negligible. The consumer who buys on Daraz, pays with JazzCash, and follows Sapphire on Instagram was not in the Nielsen sample frame. Any brand ranking for Pakistan, including the ones leaning on that study for its consumer preference signal, is extrapolating from a country that no longer exists.

The Gap This Index Is Meant to Address

Pakistan needs a proper Brand Loyalty Index. One built on current panel data, updated every year, and reflective of how categories actually look in 2025, including fintech, D2C fashion, QSR, edtech, and health-tech alongside the usual FMCG and banking sectors.

The lack of a tool like this isn’t just an academic gap. It means brand managers across the country are making multi-million-rupee decisions on sponsorships, media mix, and innovation pipelines based on a fundamentally incomplete view of consumer preferences. It also leaves multinational headquarters without a reliable way to benchmark brand health in Pakistan against a credible national standard. The result is a market that remains underrepresented on global brand intelligence platforms, reinforcing the idea that it’s difficult to decode, and, in turn, holding back the level of foreign investment and brand commitment it should attract.

Disclaimer:
Madzine’s Brand Loyalty Index is an attempt to address that gap. It’s composite, transparent, and still evolving. More importantly, it acknowledges its own limitations openly, because honest intelligence is ultimately more useful than something that just looks polished on the surface.