Marketing Australia – February-March 2019

marketingmag.com.au

20 BRAIN TRUST

Brain trust

What will you do to develop a deeper

understanding of customers in 2019?

LOUISA THRAVES

The fi rst area would be around the

data that we’re collecting and the

insights that we can get from it. It’s a

big opportunity for us going into next

year. As a business, J&J doesn’t own

a lot of fi rst party data. We don’t own

the end sale and the transaction – the

retailers own that. So we’re starting

to map out all of the different data

sources we do have available to us.

It may not be our sales data directly,

but data we get through media

interactions, owned channels and

second-party data partnerships. In

order to help us in this area we’ve

brought in a new role: audience and

insights analyst. This role focuses

on piecing together that data and

building insights from it so that we

can then better target our consumers.

Off the back of targeting, it’s

about what we learn from that;

making sure it’s a cyclical process,

where we then look at the results

and how we can translate them into

further insights, to target again.

We target, we look at results and

we track against KPIs, but prior to

having this role in-house, we haven’t

MARKETING 2019

At Heineken, international beer

brands like Tiger are continually

searching for the right balance

between global consistency and

local relevance, negotiating the

obstacles of translating global

strategy into successful local

execution. For a brand like Tiger,

the starting point in understanding

local insights is to ensure we’re

keeping our fi nger on the pulse

and making sure we immerse

ourselves in the bars and

restaurants where consumers

experience our brands.

Additionally, trends can move

quickly and staying relevant –

especially when we are targeting

young adults within premium

environments – can be challenging

and costly, and come with high risk

if solutions are unproven. In these

situations an incubation approach

can be successfully applied to

prove a business case and gain

more insight into the customer and

consumer before launching at scale.

Tiger Beer applied this approach

in Australia and New Zealand

where we were able to confi rm

had a dedicated resource to see

what’s out there in the data.

The key thing is moving away

from the old-fashioned approach

of demographics. In FMCGs, some

companies own a lot of data and

have done this really well, but some

more traditional companies still

tend to think and brief in terms

of demographics. Diversity and

inclusion is a big thing for J&J. We

need to consider it when we’re

thinking about our consumers and

not lump them into one ‘women

aged 25-54’ bucket, for example,

but instead actually understand the

individual, who they are and what

drives them.

WILLIAM PAPESCH

Beer marketers are lucky – we work

in a highly emotive category where

we are gatekeepers of brands rich

in history that are often ingrained in

the cultural footprint of a country.

As a result, consumer insights are

easy to come by, with passionate

consumers who are vocal about

purchase habits and the quality of

brand communication.