Globally, traditional market research is evolving and catching up with the pace of technology, but this is not the case in Sub Saharan Africa due to low technology adoption, poor infrastructure and regulation gap. But in this interview, Fikayo Aremu, who leads the financial services, technology, telecoms, digital and research for Kantar Nigeria believes that Africa is getting there and will hopefully catch up soon. He informed his opinion on the current focus on the development of the continent. He said Kantar is leveraging its global network and expertise to be ahead of the curve. Fikayo who also leads the customer experience domain for Kantar in Nigeria spoke on other issues. Excerpts
Marketing research is taking centre stage in the contemporary businesses, what is informing this trend?
Why many businesses fail is because there is limited understanding about the terrain they play in; the consumer and their needs and how to meet those needs. Most importantly is how to ensure that those needs are promoted all the time. In Kantar, we believe every businesse needs to understand its consumer before they plunge in to market with their products. This is what some organizations don’t realize. But now, however those organizations that care are taking much interest in the main stream market research before any decision is made. Without insight, organizations are groping in the dark.
The customer appears to be gaining more confidence and relevance in the marketing space, what is your view?
Without the customer, there is no business and that is why we say the customer is the king. Some factors account for it. They include; availability of data , availability of alternatives availability of multiple channel and increased voices and empowerment, which is linked to social media and access to mobile phones. Today over 5 billion people are connected to mobile phones globally. By 2025, it is expected that mobile phone connection will hit 6 billion out of 7 billion people living in the world. Somehow, all brands are linked towards the same customer at the same time.
What are the advantages and disadvantages of all this for businesses and customers?
I see more of advantages. The other side is that if organisations don’t take the advantages, it will turn to disadvantage. For example, let’s look at access to unlimited data. As the customer is accessing data, so also the brands should be having access to data. But the question is what brands do with the data.
Secondly, how do brands position themselves in the place of alternatives as first or second choice?
Thirdly, how are the brands’ voices heard and what channel are they employing to reach the customers. If you don’t leverage these four points, it becomes disadvantage.
Kantar, in the recent time has emphasised the journey of the consumer, tell more about this journey?
A customer journey does not start with marketing the brand. It starts from understanding the needs of the customer. Most organisations, especially in the Sub-Saharan African believe that spending much on advertising drives value for brands, but we fail to start from identifying the need of the customer. At Kantar, because we understand this full process we don’t advise you to start from the point of advertising and awareness, but understanding the customer needs, creating products and services, creating awareness, sustaining the customer relationship to become an advocate of the brand.
We found out from one of our global studies that 75 % of the millennials “spend money on experience than material things”. They prefer experience and value to just products that does not drive value for them. Brands therefore need to understand whole spectrum of the customer journey in the market space.
Experience is combination of moments. For instance, a customer that wants to watch a video on demand or from a pay TV, there are moments that are involved such an experience. It involves the customer bank, telecom provider, card switching company, content provider etc. The customer do not care about all these touch points but he/she wants to subscribe and get access to video content. If one of these touch points fails, the whole experience is crumbled. If all the brands understand where they play in that customer journey, they will put more efforts to drive experience in the moments that matter.
How should business owners be supporting their brands to remain relevant and for growth ?
Brands need technology as an enabler to drive customer experience. We summed this up in one of our Thought Leadership publication; “Momentum for Growth” for businesses in three points below- Experience, Exposure and Activation. In brand building, brand owners erroneously put the message first, but the Experience must be created first to delight your existing customers and then create the message from the experience to brand promise to both existing and future customers. Then activate what you have said to remain salient to the customers. This is what has made the successful organisations what they are.
You said technology is enabler to grow customer experience and in terms of technology, we are not there yet, is that why Nigerian brands are not creating the necessary experience?
It is a challenge but there is always a way around that. However, technology is growing and what matters is is identifying the importance of technology to your business. Fintech came to Nigeria about 5 years and they have grown because they understand how they can leverage technology to grow their business. FMCG can also leverage technology to create experience and grow its business. They should first understand what drives experience for their customers, then what are the technology driven tools to drive the experience. As I said, A typical FMCG thinks that their journey starts from awareness, but it starts from needs. If they understand the customer journey, they will know where the issues are at every point in time. Technology is an enabler.
In Kantar, how much of technology tools do you employ?
We advise and make use of those tools internally. We have created most of our solutions to be mobile compliant. We have moved from paper surveys to tablets and mobile and online. We now have online communities and panels. We have also created WhatsApp interviews. We have also moved to chatbot surveys. We also leverage AI and analytics to drive research insights beyond the data we collect from the customer, we now aggregate data from everywhere for decision making. All this is to give clients value.
What Kantar does is to first understand client business issue, who are your customers and where they are located. This determines our approach to market research for the business category. We have not totally jettisoned traditional research, as we use it where there is low mobile usage penetration, but technology reduces cost, achieves speed and delivery where applicable.
