Time to go beyond the city bubble
THE mindset and behaviour of most rural South Africans are quite different from those in urban locations, and it affects how you market your brand or business.
Our team is encouraged to escape their bubble of craft beers and food festivals to see the real world because it’s these experiences that guide and support our formal market research for clients, and affects our creative executions and strategic decisions.
That way it is possible to connect with a true cross-section of South Africans to make sure insights are grounded in genuine consumer truths, not just a small subset of individuals who attend focus groups in a CBD conference room.
As an entrepreneur or business owner you can also benefit from visiting where your customers socialise, work and shop.
Understanding consumers is the ace up your sleeve.
Metro versus regional audiences
Even Port Elizabeth’s SPAR-on-every-corner world is anything but the norm.
Cities and their citizens do not represent the thinking of the majority of the country.
Given that, our clients and the products or services they offer, just like your business, are not isolated to cities and the nearest reaching suburbs.
If you ignore insights from a third of South Africa’s population who live outside our default, go-to cities, you’re making ill-informed marketing and advertising decisions.
But before we start running focus groups out in “the bush”, perhaps we need to have a more definitive view on the inherent discrepancies between metro and regional consumers and put into motion ways to hear a real and inclusive consumer voice.
New methodologies
Traditionally, hearing the voice of the rural South African might have involved a few hours in the car or a trip on a Boeing.
It took time, cost money and, as such, it was rarely something businesses could afford or see the value of. But we live in 2017 and data collection is getting techsavvy, and rural doesn’t mean disconnected.
ý Live online focus groups take us out of the viewing facility and into cyberspace, where respondents can comprise an office worker in a meeting room in Cape Town, a mom at home in Bathurst and a student on campus in Alicedale;
ý Online communities give us the chance to create an ongoing dialogue with people, building on our learning and understanding of each other, and giving us a much deeper and richer picture over time;
ý Mobile research tools are getting better and better; there’s a host of brilliant mobile platforms and tech out there, and researchers are adding these new toys to their ever-expanding toolkits.
Even social media is an incredibly fruitful research tool when used in the right way; you can learn a lot from asking someone if they wouldn’t mind opening up their Instagram.
In one simple action, we can see the products, brands, experiences and people that matter to them and, as Dr Nick Gadsby said, consumer language is shifting from words to images, and so we [the research industry] need to become more visually literate.
You get the greatest insights from direct observation and technology is slowly bringing us closer to being able to do this.
And who knows what sort of tech is ahead of us? Virtual reality focus groups might become common practice sooner than we think.
But until this time we owe it to ourselves, our business, and the South Africans who use our products or services to step outside of our bubbles and listen to the other third of the country.