“Understanding how
people tick is still a competitive advantage”,
Dubai, UAE February 2014: Understanding how
people tick is still a competitive advantage, according to Matthew Froggatt,
Chief Development Officer of TNS, one of the world's largest custom market
research organisations.
Opening the recent TNS Executive
Forum panel, Froggatt told over 50 UAE-based delegates that content remains one
of the most important ingredients in marketing communications. “In today’s
digital and mobile world ‘Context is King’, especially in the Social context,
digital enables inherent human behaviours, resulting in a new era for chief
marketing officers.
“Comprehensive research can help
marketers with smarter, predictive surveys that aim to make sense of the
Context in the new world and this stands true across all platforms; social,
media, devices, retail, brand, service, data and human.”
He observed that using social
channels, in the context of campaigns, we see more activity on same or less
budgets. During the 2008 Olympics, Coca-Cola ran eight activities, and four
years later in 2012, it ran more than 250 on the same budget.
Marketers need to embrace big data
In fact, Froggatt went on to
explain how from ‘observe and tell’ approaches, marketers must now learn to
‘listen and interact’.
“Human behaviour is complex,
correlation is not causality and big data is incomplete however behavioural
data is context neutral. Customer relationships change and with it customer
experience research must change as well.
“However we must be mindful that
changes in customers’ lives impact their relationships with companies and key
relationships are key. Customer expectations change and grow but the rules of
the game have not changed; save shoppers time, money and angst!”
Echoing these sentiments TNS MENA
Chief Executive Officer, Steve Hamilton-Clark urged marketers to embrace the
power of predictive survey: “Big databases help when it comes to Brand and
Advertising research and enriching the Customer Experience”.
TNS looks to enable marketers with
data spanning 300,000 individual records across 120 brands and 45 FMCG, durable
and financial categories which detail key behavioural and attitudinal metrics
on brand and ads.
“While big data affords
unparalleled growth opportunities, marketers need to quickly appreciate its
benefits or face being left behind,” urged Hamilton-Clark.
A
focus on Facebook as a channel
MENA is
a high potential market for Social Media especially Facebook, according to
Eleni Kitra who also featured on the TNS Executive Forum 2013 expert panel.
Regional
statistics show that there are 31m million people connecting on Facebook on a
daily basis, of which 17 million are online via mobile, while monthly figures
stack up at 59 million and 36 million on mobile, Kitra observed.
Facebook
is at the centre of the shift to mobile. People are deeply engaged with
Facebook, in fact, 90 per cent of smartphone owners read their News Feed at
least once a day and 63 per cent read it several times a day or are constantly
checking it.
Remember
it¹s not just social media. Its marketing in a social world, she confirmed.
*Source: IDC Always connected report, US march, 2013 (this data doesn't
reflect the MENA region but only the US)
