Eileen Campbell, Global CEO, Millward Brown (MB), has responsibility for all MB’s businesses around the world. Impressed by the growth of the Nigerian office six months after its opening, Eileen came visiting. The research thought leader shares her thoughts with our platform on the how companies can sell better, research in Nigeria and Africa, data gathering, advertising research and why social media should not be taken as a replacement for advertising. Excerpts.
How important is Africa to Millward Brown’s business?
We have been in the market for the past 20 years and we ran out of new ideas but when we come to a place like this, we get lots of new ideas and inspiration. For example, with the high penetration of the mobile in Africa and Nigeria in particular, this will be of super importance to the future of the research business. We have experimented this with data collection.
Our West African business is approaching 10 million US dollars while Africa business is in the neighborhood of 45 million US dollars. This is a significant business for us. I think the business will double in the next three years. Africa is therefore important to us at MB
How do you compare research in developed market with the emerging markets?
I see Africa as an emerging market because the operation here is quite different from what you have in developed markets of America, Europe etc. The industry here is similar to what I see in Latin America and given a few years, more and more countries will generate demand for our services and make our presence viable.
The research industry business has a very fantastic growth potential but in Latin America and Africa, it is still a very young industry. I think there is a huge opportunity for marketers (multinationals) in these economies to learn how to sell to consumers or how to trade in these economies. The reality is that they do not yet to know how to trade in the developing economies.
How do you mean?
We are really into a deeper understanding of what the modern day consumer should know in the market. So what you bring into market matters to consumers but unfortunately, I think the multinationals still don’t yet understand how the trade works here. How to get the distribution right is important. Multinationals are comfortable with the modern trade style prevalent in the developed world – hyper market structure. They are yet to fully grasp the local distribution system out here.
What distinguishes MB from competition and how does this help marketers?
What distinguishes us is that we are specialized. We focus on marketing communications and media services. Most of the work we do is around helping companies understand how advertising works, helping them to track how effective their marketing communications work. We help them to understand what works, how it works and how to predict areas of successes. We try to help them get the best in the process. So, we don’t do everything, we do a little to the best of our capability. Once you have something to sell, we think of the best ways to sell and how to get it into the minds of the people.
Research to a large extent is still a hard-sell in Africa, how have you been able to penetrate the market in the midst of this cultural impediment?
I think this is in many markets but one of the things I know is that as the media market gets more crowded and as the cost of media gets more expensive, things will get more competitive and the need for research will become more obvious. Talking about multinationals particularly, if you want to spend a huge budget on advertising, somebody somewhere is going to ask you to justify it. You can only satisfy this condition with proper research.
Our company has a great story in the past that we can go out and say “we can help you with your advertising to get the best results”. We have been optimizing it to really make it obvious to the clients that we deliever. We have got some really nice “show me the money stories” based on the successes we have recorded in generating more revenues through our advertising research function.
Previously, you were running the Nigeria operation out of Ghana, what prompted your company to say “it’s now time to come to Nigeria?”
Yes, we have always wanted to come to Nigeria first because Nigeria is a place that we looked and discovered it has a bigger economy and great potential for our business. Our challenge was that it took a lot of time and efforts to get all the necessary things (documentations and other things) in place to start operation. We made a decision that we have to be in West Africa. In view of the logistics, we choose Ghana as our starting point in order to get closer to Nigeria. Six months ago, we set up a full scale office in Nigeria, I think it is only a matter of time before the business here gets bigger than our business in Ghana.
This means you already foresee a future when your Nigerian operation will overtake Ghana’s and Nigeria will become MB hub in the region?
I think it is already happening in terms of the business here. Yes, I think in a way, what we have is a reflection of what our clients do and we have more of our clients in Nigeria. We will simply match that, so you will see more and more of our presence and businesses here. Also, we will always be looking at where we can have some of our operational capabilities that will help to enhance our trade. So I can see Nigeria emerging overtime as the hub of our business as we build a bigger team. We are simply excited about the progress of our research business over the last six months that we officially opened our office here.
What is the impact of social media on brands? Some people say it is negative and others say it is positive. What is your take?
I think it can be both because brands need to know how to respond in social media and they need to be reasonable in their expectations about what social media can do for them. I will say too many clients use social media to substitute for traditional advertising and do not really understand what consumers wanted when they engage with the brands in social media.
Clients thought it is going to be free using the social media but it is not because brands need a lot of people, if they must take social media presence seriously.
Social media can be good for brands when you understand the intricacies. It can give volume to the brand through the various social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter among others. The important thing is that you need a lot of people to help propagate the message.
The other thing is that social media will begin to play a role for us as an industry; it will be used by all brands as a primary market research tool. So, it is something that we will look into to discover what people are saying and what they feel about the brand. We are going to need all that through the social media so that we can further make our survey.
What do you say about traditional method of gathering data, is it about to be changed?
We always change the way we collect data to match how consumers live their lives to enhance our technology. Take for example; when I started in the industry many years ago, we largely mailed questionnaires through post to our subjects in the US. After this era, we started doing it by telegram, continuously we were migrating. I think the most lately migration is via mobile where you ask people to take surveys from their mobile phones.
I live in Canada, we do all our data collection largely on the internet. Here in Nigeria, I keep saying we shouldn’t dismiss the possibility that the internet could be a place for data collection. In Nigeria, there are 43 million people on the internet. So with an audience of 43 million, we should at least start experimenting with viable data collection from a section of the population.
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