Why I’m cautious about most mobile platform consumer research in Africa

StanChart’s price tracker rolled out in Nigeria is a great example of where and how mobile phones can really add value in understanding the African consumer market and add substantially to its scarce database. What concerns me however is the increasing promotion of the ubiquitous cellphone as the means to gather consumer insights for all sorts of polls, surveys and sentiments.

Why?

Surveys conducted online and through the phone may not, at this point in time, offer a representative sampling of the relevant population, no matter how random. Ironically, in this context, its this very randomness that creates skewed results. Unless the results and the methodology clearly specify the gender, age, income and education breakdown of those responding to their survey, there’s little basis to assume that they are representative of the population. Reliance on such results should very much be contextual – which country, what are they aiming to show, who exactly did they survey, rather than accepting results from any old location on face value.

Here are some recent stats that help explain why:

The Mobile Africa 2015 study, conducted from GeoPoll and World Wide Worx, surveyed five of Africa’s major markets; South Africa, Nigeria, Kenya, Ghana and Uganda finding that mobile Internet browsing now stands at 40% across these markets – Ghana: 51% Nigeria: 47% South Africa: 40% Kenya: 34% Uganda: 29%

And these are the top 5 markets.

Let’s say you get results via mobile surveys – you’ve already narrowed down your sampling base to less than one third of the population. If you’re not calling them up, then you’re narrowing it further than those who can read and write, and if your survey was in English or French, its narrowed further to those educated in the language. By the time you actually get to the people responding to the survey, you’ve effectively sampled a tiny unrepresentative slice of the national population.

If I wanted to know what young tech-savvy men think, I’d never hesitate to use the results of a mobile survey. If I wished to have a better idea of lower income or female heads of households, or even those in regional towns and cities, I would be sceptical of any research conducted without human intervention. There’s also a high risk of surveys being filled in for the nominal cash or equivalent rewards. There isn’t enough quality consumer research available on the African consumer market that we can risk further muddying the waters like this.

On the other hand, as this StanChart price tracking system shows, there’s a lot of untapped potential for the use of phones in consumer market research across the entire continent. It just may not necessarily be something that works in exactly the same way in the OECD world.

Minimizing risk: buyer behaviour among the BoP confirmed by Nielson

The South African Shopper Trends report by Nielson highlights some aspects of the township customer’s mindset and buyer behaviour, as demonstrated by the following snippet from this analysis:

How we make purchasing decisions
We make decisions based on what other people say, as well as how we experience a product. There is a major fear amongst consumers (especially in the township) of wasting money on a product that may fail on delivering – hence why 92% of consumers cite word of mouth as the best source for new product ideas. This results in very little initial experimentation, with consumers rather sticking to what they know and trust. For example, many people would rather walk for 20 minutes to buy airtime from Pep than buy immediately from a trader on the roadside. If there is a problem with the airtime, they know Pep will solve it, but the trader won’t – so there’s effectively too much of a risk to not buy from Pep.

Lack of willingness to take a risk on an unknown brand or service, minimizing the risk by the tried and true over something ostensibly ‘new and improved’. Proof of performance is critical as is getting the maximum value for their money i.e. the return on their investment. Reading these two articles linked reminds me so strongly of the purchasing patterns and buyer behaviour observed among BoP customers – the very first time in the townships of South Africa back in January of 2008, that I think I’m going to finally get around to sharing my Life is Hard presentation, and my accompanying talk to go along with the slideset.

Nielson puts the African opportunity in perspective

Nielson have released a new report called The Diverse Peoples of Africa covering 7 countries. While they focus on urban and peri-urban consumers, mostly earning USD200 a month and above, there is some fascinating information available in there nonetheless. This is one of them – the visual puts the facts in context, the emerging consumer market opportunity in Africa is larger than that of India and China, albeit harder to crack. They say:

As the tactics and strategies needed to reach consumers across Africa require different approaches due to varied beliefs and behaviors, each country also requires a unique strategy. To succeed in Africa, it is important to not only ensure distribution in an unorganized market, but it is just as critical to confront the challenge of delivering an affordable product that gains consumer trust through offering quality and value.