Mogorosi Mashilo, Founder and Director at Trender, a VML supplier development partner, says research only becomes useful when you know how to use it effectively. That starts with gathering the right insights to achieve your specific goals. It also means knowing how to interpret the information you receive and use it strategically.
Here’s where many South African companies get it wrong:
1. Misalignment Of Market Research And Strategy
Research gives you truth, insight gives you direction, and strategy gives you action.
When you approach market research from a place of assumption rather than curiosity, failure is almost inevitable. What people say is often not as valuable as understanding the broader context that’s influencing their behaviour.
We’ve found that starting with consumer research uncovers the real behaviours, needs, tensions, and motivations that drive people’s decisions. From there, we analyse patterns and meaning, turning information into clear insights. And it’s those insights that become the foundation for strategy.
When strategy starts with research, marketers can successfully:
– Define the opportunity.
– Shape the brand’s role in people’s lives.
– Guide messaging and creative direction in a way that matters to customers.
2. Assuming International Findings Apply To South Africa
Too often we see brands being influenced by market research in other countries. They apply those principles in the local market and are disappointed when South African customers don’t respond the way the very reputable, well-funded report said they would.
While this information can be valuable as a starting point, providing a global perspective or insight into other markets, it’s risky to rely purely on international research. People don’t live in global averages; they live in local realities.
In a market like South Africa, consumer behaviour is shaped by a unique mix of:
– Cultural diversity and language.
– Economic inequality and pricing sensitivity.
– Township vs urban retail dynamics.
– Informal trade (e.g. spaza shops) vs formal retail.
– Deeply rooted social norms and community influence.
Even countries that have similarities in some of these areas lack the exact cultural nuances that we see in South Africa.
International insights often assume stable infrastructure, consistent income, and Western consumption habits, which don’t always translate locally. Gathering local insights ensures that strategy is grounded in how the people we are speaking to actually live, choose, and buy. Ultimately, relevance is what makes strategy work, and you only get that when your strategy is informed by local research.
3. Focusing Exclusively On Online Research
Digital tools have allowed market research to expand in ways that would never have been possible previously. But as marketers, we must be careful not to become too reliant on them, especially in South Africa.
While online research can provide scale and speed, it tends to over-represent more connected, urban, and higher-income audiences. This leaves out a significant portion of the population whose realities, behaviours, and decision-making contexts are shaped offline.
For comprehensive insights that more accurately represent the South African population, offline methodologies are critical. They allow you to access real customer nuance – the unspoken behaviours, cultural codes, environmental influences, and social dynamics that don’t always translate into surveys or digital analytics.
Being physically present in communities, homes, or retail environments (like spaza shops) gives you a deeper, more human understanding of how people actually operate in the real world.
More importantly, offline research reminds us that consumers are not just data points. They’re people with emotions, habits, constraints, and cultural identities. Face-to-face engagement enables richer, more honest responses. You don’t just gather what people have to say, but also how they say it, what they do, and what they might not even realise they’re doing.
4. Making Customers Feel Stalked
Customers like to feel seen, but they don’t like to feel watched. As insights become more available, concerns about privacy are top of mind for many people. We have the technology to create hyper-targeted messaging but having access to a powerful tool means learning when to exercise restraint. Brands win loyalty when it feels like we listened. The danger is that we stray into the territory of uncomfortable surveillance and lose our customers’ trust.
We talk about practising ‘respectful understanding’. Brands use consumer insights sensitively when they move from targeting people to serving people. Consumers are more comfortable when insights are used to improve their experience, better products, clearer messaging, meaningful solutions – not just to push sales. Use them to speak to a truth, not a person.
5. Focusing On Volume
Collecting more data doesn’t guarantee better decisions. In fact, it often creates noise and confusion. We’ve worked with many brands that have no shortage of data points on their customers, but none of them is useful.
The difference between data and market research is selectivity. Brands should start with a clear question or objective, then focus only on the metrics that help answer it meaningfully. The goal is not to accumulate information, but to uncover insights that drive action. By combining the right data with human understanding and context, brands move from simply reporting numbers to shaping strategies that are relevant, focused, and impactful.
Data, even at scale (so-called ‘big data’), is superficial. Yes, you can observe trends in spending patterns, product choice and so on, but it’s important to avoid the trap of not going deeper. In the market research we do, we’ve found it’s rarely the case that the valuable insights you need are the responses you see at face value.
People have become suspicious and guarded about their personal information and rightfully so. When we take the time to learn about our customers as people and not just as data points, we create a more valuable experience for customers and brands alike.
TRENDER
https://trender.co.za/
