January 2008
September 2007
|
A TGI Think Piece (With no apologies to Dan or Leonardo)
By Tim Bester, TGI South Africa -
17 september 2007
“If you do
not measure it, you cannot manage it.”
A brand’s performance can be measured in many ways. Actual sales (in trend), profitability, market share, number of people who use it, frequency of that usage etc. etc.; the list is endless. Individual brands will each have a preferred method dependant on the market, the brands’ target audience, the age of the brand, whether the brand is a dominant or a niche player within the market and many other factors.
All of these measures only make sense if they can be expressed relative to an independent variable. Market share is by definition an independent variable because it measures a brand’s performance relative to the other brands in the market. If market share is growing then, relative to other competitive brands, the brand is doing well.
Market share as a measure of relative performance is very powerful, if it can be measured accurately. But underlying this measure and therefore its appropriateness is what constitutes the “market”. If the market is narrowly defined, or incorrectly defined in terms of how users and potential users view the “market”, it can be extremely dangerous. “Marketing myopia” a term introduced by Theodore Levitt (1960) described the dangers of defining “markets” narrowly. Not falling into the trap of “myopia” requires marketers to find an independent variable beyond current industry norms. To do this requires the marketer to seek insight into human needs and wants, beyond the current brands (or markets) that meet these needs or wants. Condom marketers never anticipated the pill. The human need was safe sex without conception. If they had they may well have invested in the R&D required to find a better, more convenient method. In short they, not the drug companies, would have invented the pill! All we need now is a pill that also stops AIDS, and condoms will truly be history.
Does Amstel compete with other beers? Or do users of Amstel satisfy their alcohol induced and heightened socialising by mostly using another alcoholic drink other than beer? Is the Amstel user more likely to use Whisky to achieve the same end state? Or, in the same vein, does the user of Carling or Castle Milk Stout use Sorghum Beer, and not Whisky?
These questions can of course be answered by research that measures all alcoholic drinks, in a single source method. But beyond alcohol intake is the human need to keep the body hydrated. On average the human needs 2.2 litres of liquid intake per day. How much of this intake is by way of beer, or Whisky and Soda Water, or “Klippies and Coke”, or tap water, or tea, or coffee?
Human liquid intake is a “Marketer’s Holy Grail” if “liquid” is a part of the human need the brand is attempting to satisfy. It is an absolute, and irrefutable, independent variable.
The marketer of a fizzy drink can use this to measure the success of a brand across continents, within countries by region, and amongst sub-sets of the population, in a region. The expression of this measure is simple. What % of liquid intake do we achieve with brand X? This is often referred to as share of liquid throat.
For the 17.3m urban adults measured by TGI, this represents a market of 38.1 million litres per day (2.2l X 17.3m) or 13.9 billion litres per annum (38.1 million X 365). If we assume that this intake is in 220ml portions (and that other foods are not supplying any liquid), then on a daily basis about 10 equivalent “drinks” are needed or 70 per week for each individual. On this basis Instant Coffee achieves about 19% share of liquid throat with Tea Bags at 20%, amongst users. Instant Coffee achieves a 17% share of liquid throat amongst LSM 3/4 rising to some 22% amongst LSM 10. But, some 3.6 million individuals do not drink instant coffee at all! Amongst these, Instant Coffee share of liquid throat is 0%! (Clearly marketers of coffee [or tea] will know their own sales in absolute terms and by using these absolute numbers, converted to equivalent drinks, such numbers would be more accurate than relying on surveys and respondent memory).
What marketers are unable to do is estimate what types of people are contributing to their share of liquid throat. TGI allows an estimation of this.
In a similar way we can compute “meal occasions”. On average we each have three “meals” per day. That works out at 51.9 million per day (3 X 17.3m) or 18.9 billion per annum (51.9m X 365). On a monthly basis we each have +/-90 meal occasions. On average, urban South African adults who use a QSR claim to use a QSR “take away” 3.9 times per month and “eat-in” a QSR 3.5 times per month. By deduction these represent 4.3% and 3.9% of meal occasions, respectively. By day part, by week day and by week-end these “shares” change dramatically, with breakfast/morning very low throughout, evening higher over week-ends and lunchtime higher on week-days. How does Wimpy, Steers or McDonald’s stack up? The answer is in the data.
Another immutable human need is sleep. We spend about 8 hours every day asleep. That leaves us with 16 hours to do everything else, including our consumption of media. TV viewing takes up 3.6 hours on a Sunday (23%), 3.9 hours on a Weekday (24%) and 4.3 hours on Saturday (27%). For SEL 1 (the highest Socio Economic group) these “TV shares of waking hours” are 21%, 20% and 24%, respectively. Expressed in this way the numbers are both scary and illuminating. TV viewing in this sense is in competition with every other activity and every other medium. Perhaps a better way to compare media is by way of “% waking hours spent”. Such a measure would replace AIRS, ARS and the like.
Time is the ultimate independent variable in human terms. We all have an unknown time on earth, and each minute is precious. Those products and brands that “save time” are not only competing with their direct competitors (a Defy dishwasher versus LG or a take away meal from KFC versus a ready-to-eat meal from “Woolies”). They also feed on the most basic of human needs; time itself. The time to do this, or the time not to do that.
Our need for better quality time is satisfied by our want for (and the delivery of) “convenience”. The TV set’s friend is a dishwasher, a microwave and an automatic laundry machine or a TV meal; if indeed TV viewing qualifies as “quality time”! Any product or brand that satisfies the needs and wants for better quality time is a potential winner in our hectic, multi-tasked, post industrial world.
This short journey in search of the Marketer’s Holy Grail will, hopefully, set your mind racing to find other such Grails, holey or not. Any theory can have holes shot in it as the author Dan Brown has found out. But, like his racy novel, it did make us think out of the box! And thinking out of the box was the hallmark of Leonardo, not so?
(This article is published courtesy of TGI South Africa, www.tgi.co.za)
|
|
Every year, Mictert Marketing Research publishes its annual Black Emerging Market Perceptions (BEMP) study, a multibus ...more
|
A brand’s performance can be measured in many ways. Actual sales (in trend), profitability, market share, number of people who...more
|
|
