Companies in East Africa are investing in market data in order to position themselves in a rapidly changing environment creating a rising demand for Market research firms both local and international.

Christine Mungai spoke to Eileen Campbell global CEO of Millward Brown, the WPP-owned global marketing research company, on the growing importance of market intelligence in business.

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What is driving this growth of market intelligence in the East African region and why are companies willing to invest a fortune in this?

We have been in East Africa for about five years now, with our office here in Nairobi. We are looking to open other offices in the region. The region is becoming of increasing interest to multinational clients and this has over the past two years doubled our business across Africa.

Our job is to tell clients what the consumers think about their brands and what they should do for their brands to stand out.

Companies are increasingly keeping an eye on four factors key to growth; the brand, rivals, customers and communication strategies.

What kind of research are firms in the region looking for and why?

Typically a client comes to us for work in one of four areas—first is brand strategy, so they want to test if their strategy is correct.

The other is communication optimisation; that includes developing advertising copy, testing that copy and predicting what it will do in the market.

The third is channel optimisation — what’s the right media mix, and what’s the return on investment in a particular channel, and that’s everything from traditional media like TV to digital and social media.

There’s also brand performance, so once you’ve got a marketing initiative in the field we track how it’s performing.

What challenges do you face in collecting good data, and how is technology changing data collection?

In Africa, most of the data collected is face-to-face, with the interviewer asking the questions. But as mobile penetration goes up, we will be doing more data collection via telephone.

In Kenya, we will be launching our first big project where data will be collected via mobile. We’re also using data that we don’t necessarily collect — we call it “naturally-occurring data”, for example, someone’s Twitter stream. You might be talking about a particular brand on Twitter, as you talk about what’s going on in your life — so we’re interested in that.

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Naturally-occurring data, as you call it, gives access to unedited, unfiltered opinions and comments, which is obviously very valuable for market research. What ethical implications does this have, especially with regard to privacy issues?

When users are signing up for Twitter, for example, it’s assumed that they read the agreement; they know what’s public and what’s private.

If you’re diligent about it, then you know how to go in and set your privacy settings. But if you don’t and you allow that data to be public, then in fact, people can see what you say on Twitter or Facebook.

But we would never hack in to someone’s account who has not given their permission.

What are some of the interesting trends that are emerging in marketing research, especially in the African context?
First, data is proliferating, so we will be spending less time asking, and more time observing, and that could even mean tapping into fields like neuroscience to explain behaviour that people cannot easily articulate. I think soon we will be paid to connect data from different sources, and not so much to collect it.

The second is the need for players in the industry to become better consultants, and find meaning in the data. The days of dumping a big lump of numbers on a chief marketing officer and saying, “Good luck” are gone.

We have to give advice and the way forward, and avoid saying things like, “30 per cent of the population plus or minus five percentage points with a ninety five per cent confidence interval…” That doesn’t communicate much.

Technology is making a huge difference too. I look at something like M-Pesa — that’s a huge amount of data on consumer spending. Kenya is really driving our thinking on how to collect data via mobile, the first place in the world for us to do that on an industrial scale.

You’ve talked about spending less time asking and more time observing. Where are some of the areas where this shift is already happening?
For example, we used to ask people at the supermarket: Did you buy this product, how often do you buy it, and so on. But frankly, people don’t report accurately on their behaviour. So what we can do now is look at consumer behaviour using loyalty cards at supermarkets. Every time you swipe, that’s data on your spending habits.

Word of mouth is a huge influencer and social media has given consumers a huge megaphone. So we are interested in monitoring these online conversations—for example when our client Coca-Cola recently launched their “A Billion Reasons to Believe in Africa” campaign, we were interested in monitoring the conversation online, and find out what people thought about it and what they were saying about the brand.

What is your experience on media effectiveness in East Africa?

In Kenya we find that TV is the most effective medium, particularly for emotional messages, but radio is the most accessible, and is good for factual information. Outdoor advertising is also big, and effective in reminding the consumer about the brand and its message, tying it all together. Tanzania is similar to Kenya, but in Uganda we find that radio is the number one medium is getting a message across, both in terms of effectiveness and accessibility.