Innovation remains key as African countries are in constant change – GfK
Benjamin Ballensiefen is the managing director, GfK, Sub-Sahara Africa. Before joining GfK, he was Managing Executive for Vodacom South Africa and has held many management positions in Vodafone/Vodacom. He was on a familiarization trip to Nigeria, the hub that covers the West African operations of GfK, recently and spoke on the impact of Big Data on businesses among others. Excerpts
What is your mission to Nigeria this time?
Iwould say that this is the first time I would be in Nigeria. I have the responsibility to oversee GfK business in the Sub Saharan Africa region which covers operation hubs in Nigeria, Eastern African hub in Kenya and which also covers Southern Africa hub in Johannesburg. I am glad doing my introduction to my teams, getting on the ground and trying to understand what the business challenges are and what the exciting things are , and very much important trying to know what happens to the market right about now especially in Nigeria which has one of the biggest macro economies.
What impression did you have about Nigeria?
It’s huge and important market. The economy is important especially the trade relations between Nigeria and South Africa which are very well established and very important for the whole continent.
How strategic is Nigeria market to GfK business?
Nigeria’s huge macro economy and numbers are very important to us, not only for our retail panel perspectives. We gather data and we are very much reliant on big macro economies and also from the ad-hoc market research perspective; Nigeria is definitely key for us as one of our operational hubs. We have three operational hubs in sub Saharan Africa and obviously we chose Nigeria as one because it has the strategic positioning to cover the west African market.
What innovations has GfK introduced to ensure that consumer needs are met especially in a changing economic landscape?
GfK continues to create innovative products and services as we track all aspects of the consumers journey. Innovation remains key as the economic landscape of many African countries are in a state of constant change. We recently launched Supercrunch for example where we combine unique GfK data with client and third party data. That, together with expertise and sophisticated tools provides automated, data agnostic and end-to-end analytics solutions, enabling customers to take the right decisions about product launches or price promotions and more every day. In Sub Saharan Africa we are working on introducing Value Added Services comprising global products that address local and tactical business issues from Promotion and Causal Retail, Trends and Forecasting, POS Analytics and Geomarketing.
In what ways are modern consumers using technology to reinvent themselves?
That’s a very interesting question. I read an article a couple of days ago where it was mentioned that Generations Y, X and Millenniasl use different words to describe various generations. I learnt that I was born and belong to Generation Email and not a digital native born with Facebook and LinkedIn. My parents for example belong to the Generation Letter. It’s a little bit simplified but technology changes lives and it has a tremendous impact. For example the way we communicate changes and spread of awareness changes by the adoption of technology. For example there are some studies which are very clear we always adapt to the way we communicate and we train our brains to that.
I think the way we process information, how we produce information about ourselves and interact with people directly is very interesting. We see how the President of the most powerful nation in the world is using Twitter as one of the most important and impactful communication channels ever.
We use technology to reinvent ourselves and reposition and market ourselves to the extent that the amount of Twitter followers, Instagram or Facebook followers is a currency in the US and it really impacts your market value as a celebrity. Then I also see for example Snapchat which a completely different generation has adapted to.
How is GfK repositioning itself in the competitive market research landscape in Africa?
This is the question I like because this is what drives me at the moment. If you see my job title, it is called One Managing Director GfK Sub Saharan Africa. I am saddled with driving strategy to bring our two businesses together. On the one side; we have our Consumer Experience business and on the other side our Consumer Choices business. The Consumer Choices business is about our retail panels, PoS tracking and on the other side we have our Ad hoc business, our Consumer panels, and quantitative/qualitative research.
Traditionally these were areas where GfK was divided and ran separately but its now being driven together. The repositioning we are doing in the Sub Saharan Africa market at the moment is to bring all sectors very close together into market organizations where we fully focus on client- centricity and solution -oriented selling because we need to be relevant and sit at the tables of our clients understanding their business and coming up with relevant questions and solutions. We are leveraging Big Data and combining data sources smartly to get meaningful and rock-solid insights so we can answer the questions of our clients in the sub Saharan African market.