Why brands must resolve complaints on Facebook

(First part)

Kantar is one of the world’s leading data, insight and consultancy firms with 30,000 employees providing business strategies for clients in 100 countries.

Gary de Ocampo is the CEO of the Insights group of Kantar Philippines. The group is composed of Kantar TNS, Kantar Millward Brown and Kantar Added Value.

De Ocampo was the president of the Marketing and Opinion Research Society of the Philippines (Mores) in 2008 and headed Kantar TNS from 2008 to 2016 until he assumed his current role in February last year.

Q1: How should marketers map out their customers’ thinking process?

De Ocampo: [It’s always a challenge but] there are many ways to approach this. At Kantar, we always start with context. While [it] should be described in very simple terms, [it] is an amalgamation of quite a lot of things:

Consumer needs. At the core of any human decision, including choice of brands, is a universal need. A brand of mobile phone could be addressing a need for adventure and discovery, while a brand of beer could be satisfying an urge to feel distinctive or to belong to a group. A brand of car could be chosen for the sense of security it offers, while a brand of shampoo could be perceived to offer liberty to live one’s life unencumbered.

Kantar TNS [investigates] to unearth how these universal needs are expressed in specific product or service categories.

Culture. How universal needs are expressed and satisfied differently across countries is usually influenced heavily by culture—whether collective or individual—which could facilitate or deter consumers’ responses to brands’ efforts to reach out to them. [The] key is to draw insights from their customers’ contexts relative to how they interact with their immediate circles, their communities and as a nation in general.

Kantar Added Value has the expertise in [bringing out] such cultural insights that can be [used as leverage] to improve brand success.

Media. Expressions of needs and cultures are always in a circular influence cycle with media. Needs and cultures dictate what is thrown out there in media, which, with nudges of changes here and there, also influence our individual and collective culture as well as how we express our needs.

Kantar Media helps us keep tab of how brands contribute to what’s happening on TV, radio, print, online and [out of home advertising] as well as understand [the content or medium] a consumer is exposed to as the individual goes through his purchase consideration process.

Brand equity. Kantar Millward Brand helps us understand how brands are built in their customers’ minds, how their integrated marketing communication efforts have built associations over time.

We must understand how quickly these brands come to consumers’ minds when a decision to consider a brand is expected or required. Driven by these imageries and associations collated in the consumers’ minds, brands enjoy a share of consumers who are predisposed to consider them, devoid first of market factors.

Consumers see some brands as deserving of premium price over their competitors. Further, some brands are seen as having the most potential to grow, or to be considered (and hence, regularly used) not just in the short term, but also in the long term.

Moments that matter. Kantar TNS recognizes the power of engaging consumers from moment to moment, knowing full well that one’s attitudes, considerations and [consequent] behaviors will vary depending on their specific needs at given moments and in various occasions in their lives.

Google calls these situations micro-moments. The challenge then of brands is to:

1) identify these moments that matter;

2) understand the context (real and specific consumer needs, prevalent culture, the strength and quality of brand presence in that particular moment, and the media mix available) within which the consumers’ thinking process takes place;

3) flex in terms of how they can make themselves stand out.

What else other than seeing actual purchase will convince us that brands have the correct understanding of the consumers’ thinking process and effectively use this understanding in serving markets? Kantar Worldpanel monitors and analyzes on a regular basis actual brought-home purchases of fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG). This syndicated longitudinal data set is a gold mine to understand how changes in the macro and microenvironments affect specific category and brand purchase behavior of Filipino households.

Q2: What is the consumer’s path to purchase and why is it important to understand?

De Ocampo: The consumer’s path to purchase is the cyclical decision-making process by which an individual addresses the barrier between what he/she needs or wants and what he/she buys.

There are various models for FMCG products, but usually they include pre-trip planning and research, locating categories, searching for products, selecting a product, buying, and finally, usage.

Others use simpler words such as awareness, consideration, purchase and consumption. It is important to understand this purchase path because every point in the process is an opportunity for marketers to attract consumers to their brands with the end goal of making an actual sale.

In the digital world we live in (if we believe all we read), nobody makes a purchase decision nowadays without going through an elaborate process that might involve visiting a store to find a few options they like, using their smartphone to check on prices and independent reviews, going on Facebook to [source] their friends’ opinions, and completing the purchase online.

But what is the story for the weekly grocery shop? Shopping would truly be a full time occupation if detergents, pet food and bread were all purchased in this manner. The weekly shop would likely take all week. There is a huge amount of misinformation or misunderstanding concerning the “digital shopper” as he or she relates to FMCG purchasing.

If FMCG brand manufacturers and retailers are to succeed, then they must dispense with these myths, and think about what their shoppers demand from the digital path to purchase.

Although the explosion of digital touch points has made the world more complex, the basic rules stay the same.

As Herb Sorensen puts it in “Inside the Mind of the Shopper” (2009), the relationship between the shopper and the retailer consists of three shopper inputs and two retailer outputs in return. Shoppers give time, money and angst, and in return they receive items and satisfaction. When it comes to meeting shopper needs, any application that saves time, money or angst (or, even better, all three) will have a good chance of success.

Q3: You say the basic rules stay the same in a world that has become more complex. How has these influenced the consumers’ path to purchase over the years?

De Ocampo: It is now commonplace to use a combination of online and offline channels before making an actual purchase.

The usual example is when buying a car. If we have time or if we feel like it, we ask close family/friends for their recommendations, then we match those with what we can gather from online sources like company websites, review sites and car group forums (which is increasingly becoming the primary source of information). After that, we set an appointment with the car dealer to schedule a test drive or to simply get more details.

Such search activities are not only for high ticket purchases but [also for the] more mundane matters such as looking for an adhesive to patch your backpack’s stitches or where to buy your lunch at 11:59 a.m.

This does not yet happen all the time, but the seeds of habit have been planted and have already sprouted seedlings. With the encouragement of available technology, this habit is expected to grow stronger and replace current behaviors more widely in the near future.

In cases of customer complaints, one may not get much success calling a consumer hotline number or complaining directly at a store versus posting a shout out on Facebook tagging the brand’s own page or wall.

In the latter … brands recognize they are actually addressing a potential [public relations] crisis if they ignore or leave a complaint unattended.

Q4: What observation fascinates you about consumer behavior and categories?

De Ocampo: It is fascinating to see how today, more than ever, different categories are being defined by consumers not anymore in terms of their intrinsic features or functions, but more in terms of how they are enhancing the quality of consumer experience as they interact with or use these products. In fact, a lot of product development ideas today are discoveries of how consumers are mixing, matching and interchanging products according to what suits their needs or simply, what works for them in addressing what they need.

Years ago, who would have thought that the cell phone would be competing with TV?—CONTRIBUTED