BrandMASS is WhyFive’s new dataset on digitally connected South Africans in households earning under R15,000 a month. It’s the first time we’ve released a dataset on this audience, bringing the consumer class of tomorrow into sharper focus. And with insights extending right down to suburb level, we’re quite literally putting a new perspective on the map.
Let’s start with what everyone already knows: the mass market is well measured. Brands sell into it every day, media owners reach mass-market consumers daily, and plenty of businesses are built on supplying goods and services to this segment of the market. Nobody needs us to introduce it, but what we’re bringing is a new way of looking at it.
If you know BrandMapp, you know the style: less ‘income band’, more ‘actual human’. Which brands consumers are loyal to, what they’re watching, how they’re feeling, what matters to them and what kind of life they’re busy building.
Say hello to BrandMASS
Enter BrandMASS: the first dataset WhyFive has released on digitally connected consumers living in households earning less than R15,000 a month. That’s an emerging audience of roughly 13 million adults sitting just below the line BrandMapp has traditionally covered. For more than a decade BrandMapp has been our window into South Africa’s established consumer class. BrandMASS opens the window next door, with the same questions and the same depth: their brands, their media, their lifestyles and what makes them tick, all comparable with the consumer class you already know from BrandMapp.
To be clear, this isn’t a ‘discovery’. Brands know these consumers well. What’s new is the BrandMapp lens on 13 million very different people.
Who’s in the room (and who isn’t)
Indulge us in a moment of researcher pedantry, because it matters. BrandMASS covers the digitally connected slice of the lower-income market. It isn’t a portrait of every South African household under R15,000 a month, and it isn’t ‘the mass market’ squeezed into one dataset. Its superpower is making one specific, commercially relevant audience a whole lot easier to understand.
Being digitally connected matters. It’s how consumers find information, connect with brands, compare prices and make buying decisions. But a data bundle isn’t a life story. Two people in the same income band can have completely different priorities, responsibilities and feelings towards brands, which is exactly why treating them as one is never a good idea.
We like to think of BrandMASS as a clear lens into the consumer class of tomorrow.
Better together: BrandMapp + BrandMASS
BrandMapp covers the established consumer class in households earning R15,000 a month and up. BrandMASS picks up the story below that line. Because the two are built to work side by side, you can explore each audience on its own, or put them head to head and compare.
This is where the real opportunity lies. How well do the audience profiles you’ve come to rely on in BrandMapp translate into BrandMASS? Where do lifestyles, attitudes and media habits align, and where do meaningful differences emerge? And when those differences become significant, what does that mean for your brand, your messaging and your media investment? Some insights will reinforce your existing strategy. Others will challenge it. Both are equally valuable when you’re deciding where to invest your marketing budget.
Here’s a thought. Imagine two billboards advertising exactly the same product. Same brand. Same campaign. Same message. But they’re reaching two very different consumer audiences. Should they really be saying exactly the same thing? Perhaps. Perhaps not. That’s where the combination of BrandMapp and BrandMASS gets interesting. By understanding what different consumers value, what motivates their purchasing decisions and how they engage with brands, advertisers can make smarter choices about the messages they take to market. And for OOH media owners, there’s an exciting geographical dimension to this story too. But more on that in a moment.
So what’s in it for OOH?
Out-of-home lives in the real world: on commuter routes, at taxi ranks and malls, and in the neighbourhoods and townships where consumers go about their daily lives. OOH media owners know where to find their audiences. BrandMASS helps them understand who those audiences are, how they live, what they value and how they engage with brands.
For OOH media owners, it’s the difference between saying “we’ve got thousands of people passing this location” and “let us tell you something about the people you’re trying to reach.” BrandMASS adds depth to the audience story, revealing the lifestyles, purchasing behaviours, brand preferences and media habits that make an advertising opportunity more relevant and compelling.
And now we’re taking that insight one step further. Both BrandMapp and BrandMASS data are collected down to suburb level, giving us a valuable geographical dimension to consumer understanding. With the launch of BrandMASS, we’ve also developed a new online GIS mapping tool, designed specifically to make this data accessible and meaningful to the OOH industry. Media owners can explore consumer profiles at a suburb level, connecting the places where they have advertising inventory with a richer understanding of the communities around them. It’s a new way to bring together location, lifestyle and consumer behaviour, helping media owners build stronger audience propositions and giving advertisers greater confidence in where and how they invest.
And because good research is as much about knowing what the data can’t tell you as what it can, there’s one important distinction: BrandMASS tells you about consumers, not the performance of a particular billboard or site. For that, you still need reliable, location-specific reach and visibility data.
Your move
We built BrandMASS because South Africa’s consumer story is far bigger than one income bracket, and better decisions come from looking at it from more than one angle. So here’s our invitation to the OOH industry: bring us an audience, a brand or a burning question, and let’s see what this new lens turns up.
Want to find out more about BrandMASS and how it plays with BrandMapp? Chat to Julie-Anne Bell at julie-anne@whyfive.co.za or visit whyfive.co.za.