Urbanisation and the growing youth population in Africa will present a $1.4 trillion consumer spending opportunity by 2020, and this presents a huge opportunity for brands who are in a race to capitalise on the rising consumption in Africa. Mobile has leapfrogged over the lack of infrastructure in Africa, connecting consumers to the global village. Mobiles are central to life in Africa and many people make huge sacrifices to recharge their phones, even skipping meals.
In some African countries, more people have access to a mobile phone than to clean water or electricity. Phone penetration has increased hugely and the continent is witnessing one of the biggest increases in mobile data usage across the globe, and forecasts suggest mobile internet traffic will increase 20-fold by the end of the decade.
Enter Kantar Millward Brown. The global market research consultancy work with 90% of the world’s leading brands to help define brand purpose, develop winning advertising, engage consumers and drive brand growth. Kantar Millward Brown embraces the latest technologies and leverages them to help marketers compete and win in the market place. They use a variety of online and offline tactics to sample consumer feedback, typically recruiting respondents to participate in surveys by offering incentives such as Amazon.com gift cards.
In Africa, the ubiquity of mobile phones has proved to be an effective survey channel to overcome infrastructure challenges. When tailoring their reward structure for Africa, Kantar Millward Brown decided to offer mobile Airtime top-up cards to reward participants. With the dominance of prepaid phone usage, MobileAirtime proved to be an attractive and valuable incentive.
African consumers prefer purchasing Airtime Top-up cards for their prepaid phones because of the flexibility of buying low and incremental top-up values. To put this into context, this is a continent where a significant number of the population survives on $1.25 a day, so $5 for 1 month of prepaid Airtime is a lifeline for many families.
TransferTo offered a fully digital solution where Kantar Millward Brown could access over 550 operators in 135 countries to issue instant Airtime Rewards. They used an online portal to monitor their transactions in real-time, view history, and schedule values as low as $0.10 for bulk distributions or individual top-ups.
“Mobile Airtime Rewards has proven to be the most effective incentive for market intelligence and research in Africa and other emerging markets,” says Nadia Gaspari, Mobile & Innovations Director for Kantar Millward Brown, Africa & Middle East.
