For marketers and brands attempting to engage their audience at a time like this, there is no one answer to how consumer behaviour has changed since the COVID-19 outbreak. Different people react in different ways, and general observations are no longer actionable.
To assist brands with this conundrum they find themselves in, ADA, (Part of Axiata Group), a region-wide data analytics and artificial intelligence company that designs Business and Marketing solutions, held a live webinar recently.
Experts from ADA have clustered consumers together into 9 personas, grouping them according to how the crisis has impacted them and how they are coping in response to it. These personas aim to provide marketers with insights into how they can better engage with their audiences:
| The Market Observer | Increase in the use of financial apps during weekdays. 225,000 of this segment are based in Singapore. |
| The Adaptive Shopper | Concerned about being able to continue shopping, people are now looking at digital marketplaces. With 735,000 based in Indonesia, apps such as Carousell and Lazada are seeing an increase in downloads and usage. |
| The Social Citizen | Increase in the use of social and news apps to gather information and create a new normal. With 5 million users based in the Philippines, these groups of people are in a different mental space, so marketers would have to break their messages apart to become more relevant. |
| The Bored Homebody | Those who are self-quarantined or isolated are trying to get through this using more entertainment apps. This is seen by 3.2 million people based in Malaysia. |
| The Sad & Confused | On the opposite side of the spectrum, some have decreased their usage of entertainment apps, and are physically and digitally inactive. 7.5 million people of this segment are based in Thailand. |
| The Health Nut | Of course, we are seeing people who prioritise their physical and mental health during the crisis. 80,000 of this segment are based in the Philippines. |
| The Home Fitness Freak | Going beyond health, there are people who want to come back from this situation strong and in shape. 185,000 are located in the Philippines as well. |
| The Resilient One | Different from the rest, there are some who have not changed their digital habits much. While they wait out for the situation to clear, their frame of mind has not shifted and we’re seeing that in 450,000 of people based in Singapore. |
| The WFH Professional | These groups of people are using more productivity apps as they shift to work-from-home (WFH) arrangements, which include your screen recorders, WiFi finders and camera-to-PDF scanners among others. 750,000 people of this segment are based in Indonesia. |
According to JS Cardinal, Director of Product and Client Solutions at ADA, “Brands are still stuck with old patterns of using demographics to segment their target audience, but the truth is that people are more complex than that. They have multiple lifestyles, interests, priorities and affluences. That’s why we didn’t include demographics in our personas today. These are people who are going through and dealing with this crisis in different ways, regardless of their age, gender, race or status.”
According to Anurag Gupta, Chief of Agency and COO at ADA, “Marketers today are worried about balancing sensitivity as they continue to advertise at a time like this. With so much content consumption out there, the danger of going dark is that your brand will risk being absolutely forgotten – during and after the outbreak. By understanding the different personas and customising your messaging, brands will be empowered to be relevant to all. So be creative, dig deeper and find the right messaging.”
Read more on the key charts here.
