“Our role will be to market Roots Storyteller to both existing and potential clients, running it quickly and efficiently, aiming for 24-hour turnaround time from request,” says Gareth Pearson, CEO at BMi Research. “The information will provide insights on consumer behaviour at a local level for a number of different industries, filling a gap in the industry.
“While Storyteller is new on the market, Roots is not – for the past 30 years it has been South Africa’s largest urban, community level quantitative survey. It provides marketers with demographic information around purchasing behaviour in a number of categories including readership, shopping, banking, digital, entertainment and travel. Moreover, because Roots records geographical insights into consumer behaviour, marketers can see what their customers are up to, area by area.
“The increased demand for this data necessitated Spark Media to look for opportunities to help find additional resources to share the information with more clients and industries.”
Roots is conducted every three years, and consists of data collected across 120 communities. “We interview decision makers, doing 28,000 interviews last year for Roots 2016. “
In the past, data was added manually into PowerPoint to make it user friendly and easy to read but this was also unfortunately a time-consuming process, subject to human error. In order to make the whole process more efficient, Storyteller was developed by Spark Media and is a software program that allows the Roots data to be presented in a more graphic and visually appealing manner.
“Storyteller also makes it easy to run specific queries and provides detailed, geocentric view of consumers and their purchasing patterns. It also optimises data queries by rendering the required data output in a fast, efficient way for marketers and allowing them to see not only what their customers look like, but also how they behave at a local and national level,” Pearson explains.
Roots data, via Storyteller, will provide detailed insights in terms of a variety of consumer behaviours. For instance, what appliances, furniture or digital equipment they have purchased recently and whether they have bought DIY or painting tools. It can also reveal if they visit casinos, fast food outlets or shopping centres; how often they buy groceries, what they buy, which supermarket they shop at and whether they plan their purchases.
Other insights include who they bank with, what accounts they hold as well as the type of insurance they buy and which insurers they use; their main form of transport, how many cars they own per household, the cars they drive, how often they visit a garage forecourt and what they buy there.
Information for the annual Roots surveys is acquired via 28,000 interviews with 6.2 million decision makers, who represent 3.4 million South African households. The resulting insights help brands to understand their markets at a local level, by understanding the catchment areas and how they change year by year. Spark Media will continue to share Roots data with the industry as it has done for many years.
