New township consumer brand benchmark from Ask Africa

South African township consumers have voted with their wallets and hearts and in the process created 24 KASI Star Brands.

The Daily Sun and Ask Afrika have partnered to bring the KASI Star Brands of 2015/2016 to the awards ceremony, being held at the Sowetan Hotel on 19 March 2015.

Brands do more than just satisfy wants and needs, they become symbols and contribute to the way township consumers define their status and their personalities. These brands often become quintessential township brands and are closely linked with a sense of identity and belonging.

"Township consumers make up a significant portion of our population and it is important for brand owners and marketers to identify which brands are used most loyally by this group across all age, income and language spectrums. In addition to identifying these brands, the survey also ranks brands, using the same methodology, in 163 product categories. Thousands of brands across hundreds of product categories were included in the initial analysis with only 24 brands emerging as KASI Star Brands," says Maria Petousis, TGI Director at Ask Afrika.

KASI Star, Platinum and Category Winners

"These are a benchmark for CEOs, CFOs, CMOs, executives and marketers who are passionate about their township strategy, it is a metric that demonstrates marketing return on investment (ROI). These brands have generated critical township mass in their categories and have built a high level of loyalty amongst township consumers at the same time."

Media consumption

It is also critical to be able to devise communication strategies to influence metrics such as KASI Star Brands. The TGI survey provides this capability, since extensive media consumption data is collected with the branded data. KASI Star scores were calculated based on different metrics for different product categories, as loyalty metrics differ for different markets. For example, repertoire and subscription markets are fundamentally different when we talk about consumer loyalty. A key feature of the methodology is that KASI Star brand scores were not aggregated across product or sub product categories.

Sub brands were also not aggregated and regarded as standalone brands in the category. This gives the survey a unique product category and sub brand focus. An aggregated KASI Star score can be calculated at a category or brand level should it be required. The KASI Star index is essentially a weighed usage and loyalty index calculated overall for South Africa's township population.

Methodology

The KASI Star Brand Survey by Ask Afrika is one of the largest of its kind in South African with 19 sectors, hundreds of product categories and thousands of brands included in the measurement. TGI employed an enumerated area sampling design and the universe includes all communities with more than 8 000 inhabitants, 15 years+.

15,000 consumers were surveyed representing over 23.3 million adult South African consumers; of which 6,763 consumers were surveyed from townships representing approximately 9.7 million adult South African consumers. TGI's data was weighted using the Statistics South Africa's population estimates.