What’s in the consumer coping survey that we can’t get from our UAI?

Q: Last Friday (June 6, 2014), you talked about the survey data from your nationwide consumer coping behavior survey.  This was in answer to the question of a Cebu homegrown company asking how it can succeed in entering the Metro Manila market.  You answered using the data from the coping survey.

We’re a Cagayan de Oro company and we’ve been thinking of the same thing, that is, to bring our business to Metro Manila.  We talked to our marketing research director about your Marketing Rx column last Friday.  We asked her if she would recommend our buying your latest consumer coping survey data but only for Mindanao and Metro Manila.  She said that we don’t have to because our yearly UAI (usage, attitude and image) survey has the consumer data of the consumer coping survey.

So we dropped the matter.  But when I mentioned this in passing to my sister who resides in Cebu and who attended your seminar there, she told me that you actually said that your coping survey data are different from the UAI data.  Please enlighten us because if they are indeed different, we’d like to know how we can get hold of those consumer coping data.

A: Your sister is correct.  I made a clear distinction between what the UAI survey provides and what the consumer coping survey gives.

The UAI survey data is about your product category users’ U, A and I plus 2 more, another A and P (advertising and promotion.  So it’s about your category users’ A, U, P, A and I.  Those are your category users’ awareness of the category brands, their usage practices about the category and brands, their purchases practices about the category and brands, their attitudes toward the category and brands, and their images of the category attributes and how brand rate on those attributes.  Those are a whole lot of data to profile your category consumers and users by AUPAI data.  Those are market profilers and their data when creatively analyzed open up for you marketing health improving opportunities in the product category you’re in as well as for your brand.

But because the UAI survey talks only to category users and not to non-users, its data do not explore the business-growing opportunities in the often larger non-user and lapsed user segments.  Those opportunities are insighted by the creative analysis of the consumer coping survey data.

Let’s consider specifically the latest coping survey of the 2nd quarter, 2013.  In this survey, consumers were housewives and the product categories the survey covered were 155 “recurring expenditure items.”  You can learn the mostly untapped sources of growing your business for any of those product categories from the analyzed survey data.  This is true whether your consumers consider your product category as “staple” at one end of the continuum or as a “definitely dispensable” category at the other end.

A staple is a product category that housewives say they “cannot live without” or a recurring expenditure item that’s “absolutely necessary” for them.  At the opposite end, if consumers say they are “certain they can live without” a product category, that is a definitely dispensable recurring expenditure item.

For example, consider “bath soap” as a staple product category to NCR housewives.  For any product category, housewives have behaviorally segmented themselves into the “maintainer” segment, the “lapser” segment, and the “non-user” segment.  Maintainers are housewives who have retained the category in their budget.  Lapsers are those who dropped the category from their budget.  Non-users are those who have never bought or used or included the category in their budget.  In the case of bath soap, 99 percent of NCR housewives were maintainers, 1 percent were lapsers and there’s no non-users.  The business growing task in a maintainer market segment is twofold: preventing any lapsing of maintainers, and raising the housewives’ usage frequency and amount.  That’s a responsibility of a customer retention manager under a market management system.  It’s an organizational set-up that should stand side by side with the typical and traditional product management system.

Consider next, an example at the “opposite” end, namely, a definitely dispensable category like RTD (ready-to-drink) milk in tetrapak.  NCR housewives self-segmented  themselves for this product category into 18 percent maintainers, 36 percent lapsers, and 47 percent non-users.  Here, the business-growing task involves the entire market management team.  For the 47 percent non-users, it’s the responsibility of the customer acquisition manager to find out how to convert the non-users into users.  You can just imagine how much more revenue rich the business can become if even just half of those 47 percent non-users will be acquired as new RTD (ready to drink) milk users.  And there’s more.  You have the 36 percent lapsers whom your customer re-acquisition manager can bring back and re-acquire as RTD milk re-users.  You also have the 18 percent maintainers to target for your customer retention manager for retaining and for a more frequent RTD milk buying campaign.

Just think.  The survey creatively analyzed 155 product categories which housewives classified as “staple,” “near-staple,” “nice-to-have,” “near-dispensable,” and “definitely dispensable.”  The bulk of these classifications (about 2/3 to 4/5) are near- and definitely dispensable categories where you saw in the example above how much more are your business-growing opportunities there.

Then, in each of these  five product category classifications, housewives self-segment themselves into maintainer segment, lapser segment and non-user segment.  So that’s another multiplier of business-growing ideas.  And one more!  Those business-growing opportunities are presented to you by four study areas, namely, NCR, Balance Luzon, Visayas, and Mindanao.  The analyzed survey data here guides you where to source your business-growing opportunities.  If your business is participating in 2, 3 or more product categories, you can now appreciate the multiplying business-growing ideas and leads you can gain in acquiring those analyzed coping survey data.  If you wish to acquire, please contact  Erlinda Guerrero, SWS vice president.

Keep your questions coming.  Send them to me at [email protected].