Cheryl Hunter (research at marklives.com)’s weekly wrap of the latest market and consumer research:
- SA youth worries
- Online grocery sales surge
- Media allocation benchmarks
SA youth’s financial concerns
After last week’s introduction, here’s the first in a selection of interesting insights from the 2018/19 BrandMapp survey that we will be sharing over the next few weeks from Brandon de Kock, WhyFive Insights director.
by Brandon de Kock. If you think our youth are only worried about their twitter profiles, think again; they’re playing Survivor SA like the rest of us and it’s keeping them awake at night.
According to the latest official stats, there are approx 9.7m young adults between 16 and 24 in South Africa. That’s about 17% of the total population and only a million less than the population of Greater London. In BrandMapp 2018, we asked younger respondents: “Which of the following thing make you anxious?” and the answer from a total sample of 1 275 young adults under the age of 25 is sobering.
Given a list of the kind of things that parents worry about on behalf of their children, the overwhelming majority (72%) ticked a box to say they’re nervous about how they’ll make their own money in future. In a distant second, (43%) is ‘studying and exams’ — although there’s a significant gender skew showing that young women (59%) are far more likely to worry about their marks than young men (24%).
After that, things such as ‘being left out’, diet and looks are almost insignificant — around the 20% mark at best — and once again showing that young women are more likely to be worried about such things. As for social media paranoia and the evils of alcohol, they’re just not on the radar.
So, our future leaders’ hopes and dreams and bright ideas are tempered by a single, overwhelming concern: how to survive in an economic environment defined by institutionalised theft, corruption and a currency that’s as stable as a plane without wings. The single most-important thing the rest of us can do is remind them that we live in times of extraordinary potential, characterised by disruptive technology, a loss of faith in outdated social norms and a planet in dire need of quality thinking. Imagine what we could achieve if our brightest young minds spent their days embracing our formidable challenges as a country instead of angsting over cash.
• For more, go to WhyFive Insights.
Consumers choose online shopping
Online sales of groceries more than tripled between 2013 and 2018 in the US and are expected to quadruple to 2023, according to market research firm, Packaged Facts, in its report, Online Grocery Shopping in the US, 2nd edition.
Packaged Facts forecasts an immense increase in online grocery sales as online options become more available and consumers become more open to trying online shopping or using online options more frequently to purchase their groceries. Most of the market’s growth has occurred since 2016 as ecommerce platforms and conventional grocery stores have increased both their participation and their geographic footprint with expanded service areas.
Amazon and Walmart are currently the key participants in the US market, together accounting for nearly 28% of online grocery sales.
Says David Sprinkle, Packaged Facts research director, “Three key factors have created a perfect environment for growth of the online grocery market over the last five years — there’s been increased use of mobile phones and smartphones, interfaces for websites and mobile apps have improved, and there’s been a notable expansion of business models to shopping and delivery.”
• Buy the report at Packaged Facts.
Splitting the spend
The typical budget split of the world’s most highly successful campaigns is a 69% spend on television and digital combined, according to the latest edition of WARC’s Media Allocation Benchmark.
Using its database of effective advertising campaigns, WARC analysed almost 840 case studies between 2009 and 2017 that contain budget and media allocation information for TV, digital, print, out of home/experiential and other media. The key findings included:
- Successful brands have spent an average of 69% of their budgets on TV and digital channels combined over the 2013–2017 period.
- The biggest determinant of media allocation remains the size of the budget. Successful, prize-winning low-budget campaigns are highly digital-focused. At high-budget levels, TV takes up more than 60% of a prize-winning brand’s advertising investment.
- Media allocation varies by sector. Categories with low budgets, such as government and not-for-profit, are highly digital-led, as are transport and tourism, a category where consumers increasingly purchase online.
- The food category has the most-concentrated media investment profile. Prize-winning food campaigns allocated 81% of their budgets to TV and digital combined.
• Register to download a report sample or buy the full report at WARC.
Updated at 12.13pm on 18 October 2018.
Cheryl Hunter (@cherylhunter) has written for the South African media, marketing and advertising industries for more than 15 years. A former editor of M&M in Independent Newspapers and contributor to Bizcommunity, AdFocus, AdReview and the Ad Annual, she has also produced for various television networks and currently consults on communication strategy and media liaison. She now does the new weekly “Market Research Wrap” column for MarkLives.com.
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