Boosting industrial output through research

Marketing research plays a key role in boosting sales for manufacturers as it has the capacity to identify what the consumers actually need.

The Food and Agricultural Organisation (FAO) says that marketing research can provide information to the management that is relevant to decision making.

Though marketing research neither makes the decisions itself  nor guarantees success, it can still help to reduce the uncertainty surrounding the decisions to be made.

Yomi Benson, managing director and chief executive officer of Culture Communications, says marketing research can raise the margins of multinationals by enhancing sales.

“A typical example is a product known as Trophy Larger. When we picked up Trophy six years ago, it was as good as dead. It had been there for years but only few people knew it. But when SABMiller bought it, it repositioned it.

“We went to the South-West of Nigeria, spent four days at Ilesha, stayed with the people and asked them what they wanted. They gave us a name and so many other things. We had the data from our client but we didn’t use it.  We went and spoke with the people.  Few months after, Trophy became the number one regional brand in Nigeria and West Africa. That’s what research can do for industries,” Benson narrated.

Lanre Fasakin, managing director and chief executive officer of CMRG, one of the leading marketing research firms in Nigeria, said research can improve the local raw material content of a product.

“In the place of imported oil, it enables a firm to use palm oil to make soap, for instance. It enables you to make a product test to show that this one manufactured with a local raw material is acceptable. It enables you to have a technical test that ensures that the local variant is not so significant with imported one. If you are able to achieve that, the product moves from being a foreign raw material-based product to a local raw material-based product.  And you know the multiplier effect on the economy,” said Fasakin.

“This is another way it can work. If you are producing cassava bread and it is not flying, ask yourself, to what extent is it aligned with the bread that consumers want to eat?  Rather than jump from 100 percent wheat flour to 100 percent cassava flour, let’s start with the combination. You may start with 70-30 or 80-20. If you do it, you gradually move up,” he said.

“Market research will not force consumers to change their preferences. Market research helps the manufacturer to identify the preferences of the consumer. Let’s always have that at the back of our minds. Market research plays the mediatory role between consumers on one hand and producers on the other hand. Market research is what has happened to the old Omo to become a new Omo detergent,” he stated.

He lamented how companies and the government treat research, stressing that lack of respect to research remains one reason for Nigeria’s sluggish growth.

“In our own setting, the day another minister comes, the findings are rubbished. Irrespective of change in administration, we should make government run as a continuum. I have seen the research done on fertilizer under the Akinwumi Adesina, the former Agriculture Minister. Findings there are still relevant for the next 50 years, but I am surprised that nobody is talking about them now,” he said.

 

ODINAKA ANUDU  

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