How to know more about your market than anyone else: the guide to relevance by Yellowwood

ÂŠ Copyright | Luke Daniels 2013

The Guide to Relevance

Vol 1 | 4

By Nicole Zetler, Robert Jameson & Chevara Naidoo

Nothing is as important in marketing as relevance. If your products and services, communications and experiences are not relevant to the people you are trying to reach, you may as well pack up and go home. Relevance means that your consumers will pay attention to you, that they will buy what you have to offer and they will, in time, build a relationship of trust with your organisation. Getting relevance right requires that you really understand your market â&#x20AC;&#x201C; on a deep, intuitive and insightful level â&#x20AC;&#x201C; so that you can innovate to offer them marketing that resonates. Itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s the central role of marketing, in fact, and getting it right will transform your business and grow your bottom line.

The Guide to Relevance

41%

22%

According to a news article in Target Marketing, 41% of consumers said they would consider ending a brand relationship because of irrelevant marketing - and 22% already have. That only leaves a little more than one third of the market, who are likely to be indifferent. The significance of this one fact means it’s vital that marketers understand it’s a “know me or not me!” consumer world. Relevance has become a wallpaper word. The statistic above explains why it is so critical that brand and marketing managers should be on an endless quest to understand consumers of their products and services better – from the implementation of extensive CRM systems, demographic profiling, extending their expertise in psychology and relationship marketing; and experimenting with new ‘neuromarketing’ methods to monitor and study consumers’ sensory and cognitive responses to messaging stimuli. Relevance is the foundation for marketing that resonates. Knowing more about your market than anyone else provides marketers with a platform to break through the clutter and build engaging relationships with consumers, and it provides the business with a powerful competitive advantage that is hard to replicate and counter. To ‘be relevant’ sounds simple, but the brands that truly get it right are few and far between. Perhaps the reason for this is that we tend to overcomplicate it; or because we’re trying to assign a science to something that requires us to understand the fundamentals of people – entities that are inconsistent, complex and driven by many unconscious influences.

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THE GUIDE TO RELEVANCE By Nicole Zetler, Robert Jameson & Chevara Naidoo

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Achieving relevance is similar to how we, as humans, develop and maintain relationships with each other. Essentially, to be relevant requires us to Listen, Learn and Connect.

It’s time to decode, demystify, decipher and, above all, simplify the concept of relevance. This paper serves to outline how three elements — listen, learn and connect — allow marketers to know more about the consumers of their products and services than anyone else in order to be more relevant and ultimately to achieve real resonance.

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THE GUIDE TO RELEVANCE By Nicole Zetler, Robert Jameson & Chevara Naidoo

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Listening helps us form opinions, embrace diversity, experience the unfamiliar and understand one another. It allows brands to understand their consumers and put their best foot forward. But are brands truly listening to the conversation?

“The most basic of all human needs is the need to understand and be understood. The best way to understand people is to listen to them.” Ralph Nichols 1

Getting research right The building blocks of insight In everyday life, before we make a decision or express an opinion, we tend to listen to those around us to help shape these actions. Market research is the gateway to listening to consumers. Doing it well should help marketers make the right decisions. The scope, scale and needs of market research have changed radically in the past few years. The industry is shifting towards subconscious analysis and neuro-marketing in order to better understand what resonates with consumers. According to Craig Lodge, MD of Integer South Africa, “unless you are physically analysing brains, you are clueless” because “customers don’t know why they buy what they buy.” There is certainly an increasing need to be innovative and experimental in research. And it is also important to see research less as a project or event, and more as an on-going, daily conversation. Many brands utilise a combination of specialist market research companies and on-the-ground observation by in-house teams to achieve this. What is key in research is the ability to extract real insight from the findings, so that decisions are based on a deep understanding of how consumers think, feel and behave. Research can no longer be just about reporting findings through numbers and data analysis. It is critical to approach listening to consumers with holistic and adaptable research design.

Image source Eye Tracking: How we experience websites & lessons learnt from research. The image above represents how heat maps are overlaid to show where the most attention is drawn from eye-tracking studies.

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THE GUIDE TO RELEVANCE By Nicole Zetler, Robert Jameson & Chevara Naidoo

Ethnographic research, semiotic analysis and eye tracking studies are techniques that allow us to observe the consumer in a ‘natural’ environment with few external influences. The consumer is often more comfortable (or in some cases unaware) and can give a greater indication of natural product or brand interaction which is often the most reliable and insightful source of information.

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“The most basic of all human needs is the need to understand and be understood. The best way to understand people is to listen to them.” Ralph Nichols 1

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From information to insight Data in its raw form is useless; sets of figures, reels of information that can be pieced together incorrectly to render an inaccurate view of your customer. Analysing data can be complicated and it is not uncommon for even the most extensive research to yield no customer insight or understanding. Don’t confuse information with insight. It is important to collect all kinds of data, from online conversations to purchase behaviour, but as Shirley Harding, Head of Market Research at Standard Bank points out, “the real skill is being able to understand what you see and turn that into insight – it has become a rare skill.” Craig Lodge also believes a lack of skills is one of the greatest barriers to marketing relevance in South Africa. Marketers need to be comfortable with data and analytics – to the extent that retailers such as Tesco in the UK employ whole teams of actuaries to analyse purchase behaviour – but the crucial skills of psychology and creativity cannot be forgotten. Alana Dell, Consumer Insights Manager at KFC South Africa, reiterates the view that data dumps add no value since consumers use emotions to drive decisions – the job of the marketer is to understand why they feel the way they do. Marketing decisions need to be based on real insight, so it is essential that marketers understand what an insight is, and how it differs from raw data and information:

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THE GUIDE TO RELEVANCE By Nicole Zetler, Robert Jameson & Chevara Naidoo

Marketers often use the terms data, information and insight interchangeably. By keeping the following diagram in mind when thinking about markets and customers, marketers can keep probing or asking ‘why’ until an insight or actionable “nugget” is available to develop offerings and campaigns from. The insight is the real human truth.

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CASE STUDY Transforming an insight into action and profit After losing the lucrative distribution rights for Amstel, SAB needed to fill the gap in their portfolio and focus marketing efforts on a new brand. Castle Lite marketers knew that competing on packaging or taste alone against the likes of Heineken, would be tricky. Instead, they opted to focus on the insight that consumers respond to their thirst for beer as a “need for a cold one”. Castle Lite is therefore the only local beer served at -4 degrees Celsius and it is marketed as cool and refreshing. Even the packaging has been tweaked to include blue liners that seal in the fresh taste and a ‘Snow Castle’ icon that lets the consumer know when their Castle Lite is at the perfect drinking temperature. Tapping into this consumer insight and following it through with clever marketing and packaging has resulted in Castle Lite becoming the biggest and fastestgrowing premium beer brand in South Africa. The Castle Lite case study demonstrates the power of insight. But if you think about it, the best insights are often the ones that make people say, “that’s so obvious”. Insights are based on universal truths and when those are revealed, they’re easy to understand and act on.

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THE GUIDE TO RELEVANCE By Nicole Zetler, Robert Jameson & Chevara Naidoo

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DID YOU KNOW?

In South African townships, Sunlight liquid is believed to be more natural than other cleaning materials. It’s this perception of being ‘healthy’ that leads people to use it extensively and for various “health issues”. It has developed the following alternative uses: Constipation: Sunlight is dissolved in warm water, and the soapy water put into an enema to ease constipation. This practice is very common in the townships, especially done on children because it’s believed to be healthier. Skin problems: Sunlight is used on problem skin – eczema, acne, pimples – as it’s believed to be less harsh on the skin and good for sensitive skin. Some use it as a mask - they let it dry on the skin and rinse with water. Deodorant: Used as a deodorant for sensitive skin that reacts to perfumed roll on - though a lot of other soaps are used as a deodorant as a cheaper alternative. Toothpaste: Used as an alternative to toothpaste as it is cheaper. Get into communities so you can uncover potential marketing opportunities for your brand! Plan for insight development carefully; make sure you are listening to the right markets in the most appropriate, unobtrusive and in-depth way. Insight is the foundation for building a meaningful, relevant connection with your consumer. Source: Khumo Maluleke (2013): Yellowwood Researcher

You will be surprised what you might uncover when you get out into the market!

Getting out there Approach research with an anthropological view in mind. Immerse yourself in the culture of your consumer and live like them to get a real understanding of what drives them and makes them who they are. Exploring your markets with an open mind (and ear), can reveal a new world that you never knew existed. Unilever brand managers, for example, are required to actively engage with consumers and the trade market. And other leading marketing organisations, such as Red Bull, complement their traditional research with constant feedback from employees in the field and on campus, who watch how their market changes and what resonates with them.

As Shirley Harding explains: “big surveys and experience trackers don’t always help you understand as much as qualitative methods like ethnographic studies do sometimes it only takes observing five clients to give you a great idea, which often cannot be achieved with thousands of quantitative survey responses.” Plan for insight development carefully; make sure you are listening to the right markets in the most appropriate and in-depth way. Insight is the foundation for building a meaningful, relevant connection with your consumer.

Listen, don’t just hear Listening, unlike hearing, requires paying close attention to what is happening. Ensure that you are really listening to the evolving needs and mind sets of your consumers, whether these are expressed verbally or behaviourally, directly to your company or in conversation with their friends. Using the right channels is critical. Companies not keeping a close ear to the ground run the risk of missing an opportunity of a lifetime.

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How do we listen, select and use these key consumer 3. whispers and translate them into relevant marketing strategies? 1. Live, think and act like a consumer: To truly understand your consumer, place yourself in their shoes. Understand why they think the way they do. Listen to their friends, families and key sources of information; and become a part of their world. Shirley Harding reiterates, “put yourself in their mental model, not yours. Try not to think as you do; think as they do.” This allows

Listen beyond your category: The world’s leading marketing organisations know that they are much more than mere products and services. To create a relevant world for your consumers requires understanding their lives, loves and passions beyond how they interact with your category. Red Bull, for example, builds cultural pillars around sport, music and adventure, guided by market insight and their brand idea. Harding, of Standard Bank, explains “It’s essential that we understand the things that our customers discuss beyond banking. Is housing an issue? Is it credit? Is it education?”

Remember, you are not the target market: Many marketers tend to forget this. Instinctively we resort to sources that we feel might represent our audiences best. While placing yourself in your consumers’ shoes is important for empathetic understanding, it’s important to trust your consumers’ perspective over your own. Constantly ask yourself, ‘am I listening to the most accurate source?’ Alana Dell warns that starting with “my experience is…” is one of the largest barriers to truly listening to and understanding your consumers.

you to draw real and hands-on insight.

Listen to the right conversation: Technology has given us a plethora of media channels to interact and listen to consumers, but we need to filter the noise and focus on what is relevant. Define key words that represent your brand and make use of tools such as Google Alerts to notify you of online conversations around them. Subscribe to the relevant RSS feeds. Follow influencer and consumer conversations on social media to gauge evolving opinions and tone.

THE GUIDE TO RELEVANCE By Nicole Zetler, Robert Jameson & Chevara Naidoo

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Some of KFC’s local advertising

CASE STUDY Relevance = Brand Engagement A Yellowwood’s Engager study was launched in 2011 to measure brand engagement across various categories in the South African market. The brand engagement scores for brands are based on 9 key pillars covering rational, emotional and social building blocks. The connection pillar speaks specifically to relevance. Brands that ranked highly on this pillar include KFC amongst a number of others. KFC’s marketing and communication is highly relevant as they go into markets, learn and translate these local nuances into their marketing and communications, making KFC a loved brand in the markets it operates in.

Listening is only the first step to deciphering the information out there. Learning from that insight is how we dive into the mysterious hearts and minds of our consumers.

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THE GUIDE TO RELEVANCE By Nicole Zetler, Robert Jameson & Chevara Naidoo

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Learning should be inherent to a marketer’s job, from new media and new measures, to new channels and new ways of doing things. But how much focus is being placed on learning more about our customers? Often research and customer insights teams are stuck in a dark back office with little interaction with the business, marketing and brand teams. With such a vast and valuable array of information to provide and potential to unlock, it’s perplexing that marketers aren’t utilising what is literally under their noses. Campaigns based on true insight can provide huge competitive advantage. A possible reason for this is the fact that insight development has always had somewhat of a mystical aura around it. Marketers understand the value of insight, but the statistical jargon, numbers and raw data behind the insight scares many and simply puts them off. This shouldn’t be the case – some of the greatest campaigns and marketing initiatives are born from the simplest of customer insights. Given this, it’s time for marketers to think about customer insight generation as a critical part of on-the-job learning and the campaign development process. They should actively seek to find ‘insight’ from the all the information available.

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THE GUIDE TO RELEVANCE By Nicole Zetler, Robert Jameson & Chevara Naidoo

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Build a learning organisation The companies that are really getting relevance right have realised the power of their people to understand the markets they target, and have empowered them to share the insight and lessons they have. This ensures that consumer insight is embedded into every decision that is made. Below are a few tips to build a learning organisation: 1.

Hire people from the target market. While not always possible, it helps enormously to have people on your team who intuitively understand the market you are speaking to, especially in a market as diverse as ours. Ensure your teams are full of insightful, creative, open people who love to share ideas and think for themselves.

2. Build collaboration into your organisation’s structure. Make it easy for employees to share ideas, observations, experience and lessons. Consider creating an ‘internal insight bank’, encourage weekly brainstorms, flatten hierarchies so that every employee feels comfortable sharing his insight, and share feedback from those who deal with consumers every day (the social media community managers, the front of house staff, the support desk). Tom Brown, Regional European Brand Manager for Unilever, explains that category teams in Unilever sit together to form “hot houses of good ideas” with the workplace strategically

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THE GUIDE TO RELEVANCE By Nicole Zetler, Robert Jameson & Chevara Naidoo

designed to encourage the sharing of knowledge. KFC monitors franchises to see what innovations take place to meet hyper-local needs, learns, and adopts the innovations that work.

3. Find ways to work with big teams: As marketing becomes more sophisticated, bigger teams of specialists are required. It’s important not to let the creation of new disciplines lead to new silos in your organisation. 4.

Take risks. Keeping up with the cultural zeitgeist and offering consumers relevant marketing requires taking risks. Make sure you experiment with your marketing and learn from your mistakes. Alana Dell is clear: “relevance is not formulaic. It requires creativity.” Digital tracking makes it easy to see what works and what does not work, so that you can adapt and tweak as you go – and it’s not so scary to take risks if you know you are doing them based on solid insight into the market.

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Learn to avoid the common insight traps

The stand-out bias:

Fear of rocking the boat:

Justifying vs. Identifying:

Personal benchmarking:

To the person analysing the research, certain information may be more vividly recalled, when often it might only be one or just a handful of customers that feels this way. Often this information is used on an aggregated level because it is perceived to be more important than it is as it is stand out in the research.

Marketers and business decision makers often view research selectively in order to justify their own decisions instead of using the research to inform strategy and decision making. It’s about using evidence that supports your decision, even though there is plenty that would tell you otherwise.

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People often find the status quo to be comfortable and would avoid taking action that would upset it. This could lead to marketers ignoring important information about customers because it goes against the status quo and upsetting current business processes. People often don’t like taking risks when they don’t really have to.

Marketers often become too engrossed in what they themselves enjoy or what their preferences are and forget about the context of the target market (which marketers aren’t necessarily part of or aspire to be a part of). Using yourself as the benchmark skews the way you view your market and results in misdirected and inappropriate customer communication.

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Learn to understand the magic of mindsets One of the most challenging tasks in marketing involves changing consumer mindsets. Doing this allows us to break consumer habits and influence behaviour. Hard facts give a useful perspective into a market, but it is also imperative to delve into and learn about the ‘soft’ facts that have the ability to change customers’ perspectives. It is important to always ask yourself; Why is this happening? How do my consumers feel? These qualitative, soft facts provide marketers with the opportunity to investigate the topic in far greater depth, rendering greater understanding of the reasons behind consumer purchase decisions. Traditionally marketers would conduct focus groups and in-depth interviews with consumers to try and gain a better understanding of the working of their customers’ minds. The flaw is that “what consumers tell you isn’t always the truth”, according to Dan Cobley from Google. Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle of quantum physics applies to this type of market research: that the act of observing a molecule (or, in this case, a consumer) changes its behaviour. Our researchers frequently come up against this challenge. For example, in an interview a respondent told Yellowwood that she only buys RAMA, because it’s the best and makes bread taste better. On closer inspection, the respondent’s margarine was actually

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THE GUIDE TO RELEVANCE By Nicole Zetler, Robert Jameson & Chevara Naidoo

ROMI, after which she confessed that she could not afford RAMA that month, but didn’t want people to think she eats ‘cheap stuff’. Be careful to not take consumers’ word at face value, without understanding the circumstances of the research process and the consumer’s social and psychological context. In a similar vein, large group immersion sessions can put the credibility of observation at risk. Diving deep into a market with too many people who may feel ‘out-of-place’ could upset the environment and potentially change consumer behaviour. Therefore, it’s essential that marketers visit their consumers’ environment regularly in an unobtrusive way to truly get an accurate picture. Focus on trying to uncover the truth behind consumers’ purchase behaviour. Brown reiterated that he has been to every township in South Africa numerous times to see how consumers live and interact with products. To ensure that natural behaviour is maintained, Unilever ensures that no more than 2-3 people, including the driver, go on any given excursion.

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CONSUMER COMMENT

“Processed cheese”

“Pizza was cardboard”

“Totally void of all flavour”

WHAT DOMINO’S DID

New Cheese

New Crust

New Sauces

NEW CUSTOMER COMMENTS

“It’s really good”

“This is great”

“There is a lot of love in there”

THE END RESULT

Today, Domino’s is the second largest pizza restaurant chain in the world. In 2009, the year after the turnaround Domino’s share price rose 130% from the previous year.

Learn to accept the gold hard truth The end goal of any research is to reveal the truth, but often the truth can be hard to digest when it is not what you were expecting or highlights a failure on the part of your business. Stubborn brand managers who thought they had it all figured out are regularly shocked by the outcome of research into consumer perceptions of their brand. It is the responsibility of a good brand manager to accept the research whether the result is negative or positive, and to do something with it. It is part of building a learning organisation. A brand that has been able to do this particularly well is Domino’s Pizza, who decided to commission some research to explain why they were losing market share. After spending time with their consumers on an intimate level through qualitative research, Domino’s realized that is was not their brand that was failing them, but their product. Consumers felt that the pizzas were sub- standard and that Domino’s needed to do something about it. Accepting negative feedback is important; it lets you know what needs to change in order to improve.

Marketers need to become more comfortable with criticism, understand that negative feedback isn’t good - it’s golden. Learning more about your consumers is vital and will ultimately lead to a future where your brand is more capable of creating meaningful customer connections, resulting in overall brand and business success.

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“You can either use negative comments to get you down or you can use them to excite you and energize your process of making a better pizza. We did the latter.” Patrick Doyle President of Domino’s Pizza

RELEVANCE CHECKLIST

What should you learn about your consumers? What do your consumers care about?…and not just which brands do they care about How do your consumers spend their lives?…and not just what demographic box they fit into Where do your consumers live, work and play? …and not just which media channels reach them

What do your consumers need? (Functionally, emotionally & socially)…and not just how to spin what you already offer

What do your consumers think about your brand, product or service?…and not just what you have been telling them to think

‘Connecting’, or forming a relationship with your consumer, is the ‘holy grail’ of marketing. Relationships are formed when people interact with each other, choose to communicate with each other, and are comfortable with each other. Given this, marketers are going to great lengths to transform relationship-creation into a science. But the more it is formalised into a process, the more the authenticity of any real relationship is compromised.

Ditch the demographics The rise of mass production and mass market advertising in the 1950s and 1960s required marketers to understand the main groups of people that they were marketing to so that they could target communication. As a result, a generational classification system was developed which grouped the population into segments based on which year they were born. These generational ‘buckets’ were given names such as ‘Baby Boomers’ and ‘Generation X’ with each group being assigned a behavioural profile and traits which provided marketers with additional insight into the broader population. Recognising that generational profiling was rather limited, alternative classification systems such as VALS (Values, Attitudes and Lifestyles) were subsequently designed to profile consumers more comprehensively using psychographic data. Although organisations have become more sophisticated with more complex database management systems, they have continued to use demographic information (i.e. age, gender, race, income level, marital status etc.) to define and segment their markets. But with high levels of fragmentation and the rise of new technology that has changed the way people consume information, shop, decide and purchase products and services, it poses the question: if marketing has changed so much, becoming so much more personalised, surely the way business and marketers view their consumers should follow suit?

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Comparing views of the same user: demographic vs. multi-faceted view Multi-faceted view:

Demographic view:

vs.

White, Female Age 25 – 34 years old Gauteng R300k – R350k annual income

The gap between marketing and consumer understanding seems to be getting larger. New technology and the rise of social media have made the need for hyper relevance critical, yet marketers are still using ‘off-the-shelf’ consumer classification systems and demographic profiling. What makes matters worse is that the proprietary frameworks are often developed in countries such as the United States where the market dynamics and social contexts are completely different to South Africa and other emerging markets. What relevance do social shifts in the USA in the 1970s, for example, have for the majority of South African consumers? Demographic profiling has massive limitations. Not only does it give marketers a one-dimensional, cold, scientific view of the consumer, but with the same demographic

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Woman focused on her career Currently renting apartment in Sandton city centre but is looking to buy a house in the suburbs within the next 2 years Spends 10% of her salary online Values and seeks convenience

information available to all players in an industry, how can marketers expect to differentiate their brands, products and services on unique consumer insight? How can an organisation really innovate to meet unique consumer needs if the underlying basis for which offerings are developed is exactly the same for everyone in that industry? For example, if two financial services providers were to segment their markets using monthly income as a key variable, their offerings and the way they approach their consumer groups would be almost identical. Harding shares the same view: “In financial services, what you can afford does influence your behaviour and income is a driver, but it’s not the overriding factor. Marketers have to understand what the driving factors are behind choice… whether it’s needs-based drivers or lifestyle drivers for instance”.

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The Gephi online tool allows you to cluster online communities and key influencers from a brand’s social media platforms to help marketers better understand their customer communities”

At Yellowwood, we believe that to connect with consumers and look at consumers as people, marketers need to adopt a more versatile approach. The following characteristics are essential when connecting with the ‘new’ consumer: Multi-faceted: To achieve a sustainable competitive advantage and understand your market better than anyone else, you need to understand and layer different types of information about your consumers. Build a profile of needs, lifestyles, attitudes, behaviours, mindsets, lifestage and psychographics for each consumer cluster, so that you get as close to individually relevant as possible. According to Harvard Business Review (2009), “for customers to fall in love with your product or brand, you need to understand their personality and passions and see how those connect with your product or service”. Think of it like online dating: demographics can be useful to narrow the pool down, for instance to 32-year old males in Johannesburg, but to find the right partner (or consumer), it is critical to consider personality, interests, value systems and lifestyle. Only once you have all of these facets in place can you get a general sense, or intuitive understanding of your consumers. You will know what feels right for them, because you ‘get them’ – and it is possible to target offerings accordingly and ensure hyper relevance.

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Contextual: All too often companies embark on large-scale, extensive primary research to glean insights about consumers for strategy and product development, without accounting for changes in the market. Understanding consumer context is essential for relevance. Not only are people fickle, but macroeconomic shifts impact decision-making, attitudes and behaviours. Harding describes this context as a ‘human eco-system’. She explains; “it’s one thing to understand the person, but it’s important to understand the context in which they operate too – how they live, their daily activities, reference points, environments etc.” Consider how much spending behaviour has changed in the last four years, from an economic boom, to recession to post-recession uncertainty and market turbulence. If you based your consumer insight on a single piece of research, your view of the consumer and the associated offering would be outdated and irrelevant. It is essential that marketers consistently ‘check’ the context in which their market operates.

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HERE ARE SOME TIPS

Tips to ensure contextual relevance to connect with customers: 1. Understand the bigger picture:Keep your marketing team abreast of macro-economic shifts and consumer trends. Attend and feedback on trends presentations, distribute economic reports, host guest speaker functions and make knowledge of current affairs a performance objective. 2. On-going dipstick qualitative research: itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s expensive to commission a large-scale primary quantitative research study, but smaller qualitative studies such as focus groups or in-depth interviews are a quick andcost effective way to glean consumer insights. For example, Unilever recently filmed a television commercial in South Africa to be rolled out in other markets. In focus groups, Nigerian respondents pointed out that the bananas used in the ad would not typically be found in a Nigerian marketplace. Unilever removed them. Without this research, the advertisement would have been irrelevant in a Nigerian context. 3. Know the enemy: competitor intelligence allows you to easily garner market shifts. Seeing how other industry experts view where the market is going provides a sense check of your view, and monitoring new entrants and exits helps keep up to date with changing consumer perceptions of industries. 4. Social media is the ultimate context provider: the first place new consumers go to vent, ponder, or rave are social media platforms. These channels have given marketers instant access to the market and trends. Ask for feedback regularly, and check whatâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s trending locally and internationally. Many free online tools, such as Gephi, exist to help extract and visualize data from your social media platforms in a way that allows understanding of customersâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; communities, influencers and influential topics.

Bring the organisation wide understanding of the customer alive Many large-scale research exercises such as segmentation studies and brand trackers end up in drawer somewhere, unused. The Yankelovich and Meer survey from Harvard Business Review (2006) reported that of the 59% of CEOs who had conducted a major segmentation in the last two years, only 14% had derived value from it. Customer research studies like segmentation are powerful tools to provide rich customer insight that is critical for communication, new product and strategy development. The primary reason why so few CEOs feel they get value from them is not the clustering or statistical mechanics, but rather that too few organisations distribute and implement the insight throughout the business. How often do you hear employees, especially in leadership positions utter “what do the Traditionalists want again?” or “how do the Achievers differ from the Innovators?”

Make it tangible: consider using posters, tabletalkers, photo galleries, on-hand booklets, mood boards, visual icons, consumer rooms with permanent spaces that describe each consumer segment, desktop screen savers, mouse pads and other office ‘currency’ such as coffee mugs and stationery.

Inspire & engage: not everyone likes to read large reams of information, and you want people in your business to ‘get’ the consumer instinctively and emotionally - so consider using ‘a day in the life of’ ethnographic videos, vox-pops with people representing the segment or digital multimedia to really get the character of the segment across.

Yellowwood has developed a number of ways to bring segmentation clusters and consumer understanding alive in the organisation – this is where science and art meet to achieve something rather extraordinary:

Involvement to aid recall: as staff engage with and discuss the different consumer segments, their understanding will become clearer. Build in interactive sessions such as reanimation workshops, spur of the moment skits, and question time sessions with audiences who represent different consumers. Create high energy premier events to create excitement. Unilever, for example, runs dedicated ‘consumer connect’ sessions to share consumer insights and knowledge with the broader teams.

Those businesses which bring the organisation-wide understanding of the customer alive – from those in leadership positions all the way down to front-line staff – derive enormous value from a shared language, aligned priorities and more focused and relevant products and services which lead to increased financial rewards.

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Name your segments appropriately: once consumer segments are developed, it’s important to give them names that are memorable, identifiable, distinctive from each other, descriptive and simple to understand.

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CASE STUDY Bringing the organisation wide understanding alive to connect with customers After embarking on an extensive bottom-up segmentation study, OfficeMax realised that in order for the segmentation to work, it had to be lived in the organisation. They therefore formed cross-disciplinary teams from different parts of the organisation where they collaboratively decided on an initial ‘super segment’ to concentrate efforts on. They created a persona for this customer cluster named ‘Eve’ and engaged with all business units from sales to engineering. The teams asked “what would Eve do?” and “what would Eve want?” and by doing this the whole company engaged with the segmentation and began to look at customers differently. As a result, OfficeMax changed their approach to business, connecting with customers like never before. They enjoyed triple digit rates of return on initial investment. Sales also exceeded initial forecasts, the speed of change in which new product lines were developed also improved and more targeted recruiting practices were introduced.

With a focus on Africa, MTN carried out a large-scale pan-African segmentation study in order to segment their prospective African base. The output resulted in the development of a number of homogenous consumer segments that can be applied to various African markets. Segment names include Trendies, Survivors, Trader, Progressive and even a Her & Home segment. Realising the power of this consumer insight, MTN’s prerogative was to ensure that the segments are lived in the organisation. Therefore, simple and easy to understand collateral was produced and distributed to staff especially those who are customer facing i.e. table talkers, multimedia and visual posters. This way, staff can easily tell when they see a customer, which segment they are part of, their needs and how they should be treated. Bringing the segmentation alive internally has helped MTN realise its African strategy and serve and connect with its customers on the continent better.

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New Product Development

Marketing & Communication

Innovation

Processes

Build a platform to connect If you get all of this right, you will have a thorough, deep, organisation-wide understanding of your market. This insight should guide every innovation that your organisation embarks on – from new product launches to advertising and brand experiences. Listening and learning will equip your organisation to know your market better, but to truly connect with them you need to act on this knowledge and insight. You need to build it, so that they will come. The way to build a platform for connection will depend on your industry, your consumers and your business. Red Bull, for example, uses insight into their consumers to build a relevant content world around music and adventure sports and spectacle. For others it may be public art, or opportunities for consumers to help build a school in an underprivileged area. KFC ensures that every little detail of their communication has been checked for relevance – from the music in the ad, to the references (for example, will this segment relate to a yoga comment?) and the accents. If your insight into your market is spot on, you can innovate to create something that is truly relevant to them. The test is clear: if your consumers choose to participate in what you create, you are relevant. If you know them better than anyone else, you should also be the first to give them what they want.

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TO WRAP UP

Being relevant means Listening, Learning and Connecting – what are the implications for marketers? 1. Understand that your job will never have defined working parameters: consumer insight can come from anywhere at any time; and it’s likely you’ll learn more about your market when you’re not at your desk. 2.

A multi-dimensional view is essential: Do not rely on a single source, or a single methodology to gain true insight into your consumers. Layer behaviour tracking with psychological analysis and market context. Expand your horizons to understand key economic drivers, trends, current affairs, and the loves and passions of your consumers. Get out of your office and into their lives.

3. Never stop learning: the process of gaining insight is on-going, not static. Your consumers are learning every day and their behaviour will shift. With on-going focus on insight identification, you can be the first to apply it and win. 4. The consumer needs to be at the centre of everything you do: marketers often get wrapped up in campaigns and tactics – trying to do it differently and trying to push the envelope further. Always check back and ask yourself: is this truly designed with the consumer in mind? Does it answer a need of theirs? Will they even care? 5. Make everyone a marketer: Don’t keep consumer knowledge to yourself. Ensure everyone in the business is exposed to, and contributes to, consumer understanding. Relevance can only be achieved when everyone in the organisation is on board, living, breathing and innovating for consumer insight.

Mention the word ‘relevance’ and marketers’ ears will automatically prick up. The reverence around the topic is justified. No one wants to be considered irrelevant. True marketing relevance means that your consumers will resonate with your messaging, feel loyal to your brand and seek out your products and services. It is the foundation of engaging, profitable customer relationships. Because so much importance has been placed on the subject, we have tended to over complicate, over engineer and over think how to be relevant. As this paper demonstrates, being relevant to your consumers means reminding yourself that regardless of which segment of the market you are targeting, you are still targeting people – not numbers, foot traffic or income segments. Get out into the market, pay attention, talk to your ‘consumers’ as you would ordinary people in your life, and make an effort to paint a picture of these people to your colleagues. By doing this, everyone in your organisation can better understand who it is that they’re serving and what the actual purpose of their jobs is. It is only then that you’ll know more about your market than anyone else. It’s only then that your business can truly offer relevant products, services, communications and experiences that achieve real resonance with your market.

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Nicole Zetler

Senior Strategist Yellowwood Johannesburg Nicole has a background in financial services marketing, and has headed up a number of large brand repositioning and marketing strategy projects across a number of industries while at Yellowwood – both in South Africa and in a broader African context. She is passionate about relevance for the simple reason that she believes so few marketers are getting it right.

Chevara Naidoo and Robert Jameson are Analysts on Yellowwood’s Strategy team. Chevara believes relevance is about more than products or services – it’s about finding the nuances that really connect with customers in a way that means something to them. Robert hopes to help marketers realise how much value is gained by being relevant – and that it’s not complicated to do; it just requires hard work.

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• Ethnographic Research: A Key to Strategy http://hbr.org/2009/03/ ethnographic-research-a-key-tostrategy/ ar/1 - , Ken Anderson (March 2009) • Four Strategies for Staying Relevant. Harvard Business Review. Aaker,D (2012). URL: http://blogs.hbr.org/ cs/2012/05/four_strategies_for_staying_ re.html • Gephi. (2012). The Open Graph Viz Platform. Available: Gephi.org. Last accessed 1st Febru 013. •

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How to Stay Relevant In An Accelerated Word http://spinsucks. com/entrepreneur/how-to-stay-relevantin-an-accelerated-world/ : ld, Steve Kaplan, (April 2012)

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• Want to understand your customers? Tjan, A (2009). : Harvard Business Review Network. URL: http://blogs.hbr.org/ tjan/2009/05/want-to-understand your-custom.html • We’re all marketers now http://www.mckinseyquarterly.com/ Were_all_marketers_now_2834 • We’re all marketers now, Tom French, Laura LaBerge and Paul Magill (July 2011) • What physics can teach us about marketing. Colby, D. (2010). Available: http://www.ted.com/talks/ dan_cobley_what_physics_taught_ me_about_marketing.html. Last accessed 1st February 2013. •

Why marketers need to spend time out of their offices http:// newmediaandmarketing.com/whymarketers-need-to-spend-time-outof-their-offices/consumersconsumer-behavior (6 August 2012)

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