By Kristy Hesom
On Thursday, 7 April, CEO of SPARK Media, Gill Randall, welcomed guests and (after a few microphone related issues) wasted no time getting started. Randall pointed out that while we live in a time where consumer confidence is at an all-time low, inflation and interest rates are increasing rapidly, and unemployment remains a major challenge, the finding of the ROOTS survey wasn’t going to be “one big, bad news session”.
Randall went on to say that they hoped to present the findings in a way that marketers could “use the data to be able to look at global best practices and scientific evidence on how you should do good marketing and how you can understand how your consumer work”.
“At SPARK Media, we’re all about science,” said Randal, “We’re about understanding what makes markets work, how consumers behave, how we can find ways of doing better marketing, and how we can partner with our clients to share this information.”
The science of marketing
“Science has finally come to marketing,” said Randall, “There is evidence now, collected by the biggest group of marketing academics in the world, to prove laws and principles of how marketing works, how consumers behave, how they engage with advertising and what makes them buy one brand over another.”
Randall then pointed to the
Ehrenberg-Bass institute for Marketing Science (EBI) founder, Dr Andy Ehernburg, who was one of the first people to put forward imperial evidence about how markets work. Randall points out that the guidelines used by the EBI are simple, but effective. “They are firmly rooted in evidence based outcomes, which is the latest buzz in all sorts of scientific research.”
What this had to do with ROOTS was the question that the audience had on their mind. Randall had the answer.
“We are incredibly proud to stand here today and say that ROOTS is now part of this global database,” said Randall. She went on to explain that South African consumers, previously viewed as different and other from the rest of the marketing world, “behave just like everybody else in the world.”
Previously, South African marketers were told that international data only applied to “mature markets”, and because South Africa is mostly third world and part first world, the information was not relevant. EBI, however, decided to do the exact same kinds of research in markets like Brazil, China, and South Africa: and they found that the same rules and principles apply.
Check out
Part 2, where these principles are explained.