By Adam Wakefield

It was on the morning of Friday, 28 October that invited guests met at the Protea Hotel Fire & Ice! By Marriot in Melrose Arch to hear in detail about the current landscape in which consumers and marketers live.

The first speaker was Nicki Cunliffe, a partner at Kantar Vermeer Africa & Middle East, who spoke about insights gathered in the firm’s Marketing2020 report.

According to Cunliffe, it cannot be denied that what marketers do today has changed compared to the near past.

“Increasingly, customers are demanding a total brand experience. It’s not the product they’re interested in buying exclusively,” she said.

As the marketplace has changed, customers’ habits have changed. However, as detailed by Cunliffe, the way marketers are organised has not. To keep up with the times, three organisational aspects that marketers should pay heed to if they want to succeed are: Big insights from big data, purposeful positioning, and total brand experience.

Around these organisational aspects, marketers and brands need to inspire through brand purpose, do fewer things excellently, have the right staff in the right roles, and build marketing capabilities to drive growth.

Following Cunliffe was Nomsa Khanyile, director of consumer and market insights at Unilever Africa. She spoke about how Unilever uses data and insights to drive customer-centric growth.

An important decision taken at Unilever was to make their global information system accessible to all in the organisation, which Khanyile said is “quite powerful and aligns the organisation behind one set of data”.

The company is not just able to predict the future, but shape it through the use of different technologies. It also means mitigating risk, expanding possibilities and building relationships with people.

“If you are not at the table, guess who they are serving up for dinner?” Khanyile said.

Next was Rosie Hawkins, global director of client solutions at Kantar TNS, who focused on the connected world consumers live in.

According to Hawkins, mobile dominates the South African market and it is through mobile devices where consumers spend the majority of time online. It is a phenomenon that Hawkins said occurs in other African and Asian markets, where the PC has been leapfrogged by such devices.

“People are spending just under four hours a day on their mobile devices. The vast majority of that is on mobile. There is a little bit of tablet and a little bit of PC. We are not seeing a huge difference with younger people,” Hawkins said.

“The other important thing to understand is the fairly even split between consumption of traditional data and digital data.”

One thing Hawkins found surprising, as digital channels become more pertinent, is the apparent disregard of basic marketing principle. Digital is still being treated as a self-contained channel that does not co-exist with other channels. Rather, digital co-exists with all other channels, and marketers must be thinking about what Hawkins called “total experience”. Marketers must blend all the channels they use.

There is no such thing as offline and online people, “it’s all the same people”.

Mike Oelschig, Cerebra’s head of advisory and insights, was next to speak. His talk covered social media and the importance of brands engaging with their consumers through social media.

“We love to mark millennials. They have almost become a punchline to every joke about your business. Millennials are the biggest age group today. In 2020, they will make up 50% of the workforce. They are taking over how businesses are run,” Oelschig said.

“Organisations need to stop fighting and start adapting to the way these guys are thinking. These guys grew up in a social age.”

The principles that businesses can adopt for social media come down to CATS: conversation, authenticity, trust, and sharing.

“Social principles are the difference between a business that does social and a business that is social,” he said.

Lastly, chief marketing officer at Wunderman, Mpho Maseko, spoke about connected life in 2016, and how good marketing is the art of telling good stories, especially through video.

“We, as brands, need to become passengers. It’s about telling a story. We need to stop interrupting what people are interested in and become what people are interested in,” Maseko said.

If the impact made by brands is meaningful and positive, brands will see a positive return as well.

For more information, visit http://www.tnsglobal.com/. Alternatively, connect with them on Twitter.