They say the ‘proof is in the pudding’. This has never been true in advertising and marketing, especially in the digital age. The pudding, of course, is the customer, and the proof is the data.
But to date, data in the advertising industry in Kenya has largely been quantitative, with attention mainly on core demographics, or datasets focused on only some aspects of consumers’ lifestyles.
To avoid being at the bottom of the pyramid, marketers need to consider not only the age, location, affluence and gender of our consumers, but also how they make decisions, their attitudes towards various lifestyle and shopping habits and what drives their behaviour and media consumption.
This will aid in developing relevant, holistic strategies.
We, Dentsu Kenya, closed these gaps through our bespoke Centralised Consumer Study in 2018. It answered questions about Kenyans’ psychographics, behaviour, decision making and lifestyles.
We interviewed over 3,000 Kenyans in key cities across the country, and collected information about their households, shopping habits, usage of products across various industries, and their reactions and attitudes to advertisements across 60 media touchpoints.
With this data, we refined and redefined how consumers can be targeted more efficiently. However, the landscape has since changed, with shifts brought about by Covid-19, the growth of new media platforms such as TikTok, and more attention to sustainability development by both brands and consumers.
This prompted the need to refresh our data and capture these new trends to keep us ahead of the curve.
We went back to the field and interviewed 3,500 Kenyans as we did in 2018, with a wider spread to include those in rural areas and included questions about the effects Covid-19 had on their lifestyles, their usage of new media platforms, their attitudes to sustainability topics and included more local brands in our category questions.
Our study is a game changer, enabling us to pinpoint precisely how consumers behave; what they need, think, make decisions, and their attitudes to various forms of advertising.
Having such qualitative data allows us to market more effectively, targeting the right audiences at the right place at the right time using the right content on the right channels.