Market Research - July'08

The waning attention span of consumers is undoubtedly one of the biggest challenges for marketers. How do you make that fleeting look at the brand stay for at least a couple of seconds more? How does a brand make itself visible amongst hundreds and thousands of others vying for that same consumer's attention?

To craft a solution, Starcom MediaVest (SMV) has launched IntenTrack, a proprietary research tool, which measures not reach or frequency of the product but intent of the consumer -- a challenge in itself.

"Intent is not a uni-dimensional static measure. It is a multi-dimensional and dynamic measure which changes based on business challenge, product category and a brand's life stage," Ranga Somanathan, vice president, Insights and analytics, Asia- South, SMV group, says.

Over the past couple of months in operation, IntenTrack has covered more than 200 brands from 30 categories across 28 countries. By measuring the impact of attention, the brand's Intent health can be tracked which allows planners the ability to constantly optimise contact selections and deliver higher returns on objectives.

"We have been talking to consumers across the world via this track from January last year when the Intent measure was put to test. The objective is to demystify the consumer's path to purchase via a proprietary framework called Connections Stories," Somanathan says.

SMV defines intent as consideration, validation, expression and exploration or actively searching for information about the brand. Somanathan says this can ultimately encompass a consumer's desire to purchase or recommend a brand.

When SMV delved deeper into developing IntenTrack, "connections that captivate" became more than just a tag line for the tool. It evolved into a platform to deliver captivated consumers. "We developed a belief that the marketing world is ready for a new measure of accountability and deliverable, which is intent," Somanathan adds.

Over the last 16 months, SMV has had a dialogue with over 2 million consumers about their media choice, intent behaviours and purchasing habits. In Asia, IntenTrack talks to about 5000 new consumers every week including 300 in Singapore.

The next step, the company says, is to look at assimilating all the findings and come up with benchmarks and norms.

According to Somanathan, "focusing on consumer attention and intent, SMV has a proven planning approach to support media mix optimisation. This is both ROO and ROI". Singapore is the first market in Asia to launch IntenTrack. China, Thailand and Japan have since followed suit. Other countries that are expected to soon launch IntenTrack include Malaysia, Indonesia, Philippines, India and Hong Kong.

There are five categories presently being tracked are alcohol, automobiles, banks, consumer electronics and mobile phones.