Analytics and insight

The fragmentary behaviours described above make people very difficult to categorise, rendering the old definitions of consumer groups by demographics alone much less useful. Analysis of information needs to go beyond trends to reach an empathy with consumers, and a way of predicting behaviour on an ongoing basis rather than just an isolated response to a particular stimulus. Added to this, businesses need to understand every aspect of their communications with consumers across more than one territory.

The ‘holy grail’ is combining behavioural and attitudinal data to reach a more robust predictive model for what a consumer will do, reducing the need for real-time experiments and spending money in a much more efficient, effective and targeted way. Synovate Aztec has already begun to do this in a retail setting, and with our acquisition of SPSL we will now look for opportunities in customer and purchase tracking, marrying retail data with real-time footfall information to create a realistic picture of how a consumer behaves in a retail environment.

The major hurdles to reaching this are primarily practical. Some of the bigger internet-based media owners are building or acquiring the ability to measure effectiveness. But most platforms are far from comprehensive. Tracking new media can be very difficult, especially with regard to ownership of the customer data. For example, in mobile each network provider owns proprietary data about its users. But unifying this would take a common tracking system. Apart from the reluctance of the networks to share data with their competitors, devising a system to work on all phones has so far proven prohibitively complex. Similar issues exist with measuring ‘in-game’ advertising. There is also the issue of amalgamating data from different sources – different media owners – to see what a customer is doing on all platforms, rather than just the internet.

In addition, consumers are beginning to wake up to the fact that their behaviour is being tracked, particularly online. They have become aware of the value of this data. This affects response rates. As a result, getting insight takes on a different tone. By using the internet, brands can incentivise – and understand – the consumer on a much wider scale than before

Broadly speaking, all this leads to complexity. The more data there is, the more important it is that insight is based on sound techniques. Making life easier for those who have to make sense of data with tools for collating, interpreting, presenting and comparing insights must now be at the top of any market researcher’s to do list, along with the traditional values of data integrity and accuracy. And now, we can also do this in partnership with new data ‘owners’ like search engines or social networking sites.

Fig 5: Global media spend by category

Source: Carrat