Building a Global Database of Consumer Attitudes

As the international marketplace continues to grow, Global Dairy Platform is aiming to share successful generic marketing messages and campaigns, as well as cooperatively use the limited funds available to ensure that generic messages about dairy products are communicated with maximum effectiveness.

By helping to provide an opportunity to share market research and market drivers from different regions around the world, GDP hopes to provide insights into consumer behaviour and preferences, but also to ensure that dairy organisations are able to identify markets with similar consumer needs where sharing of messages and media may be appropriate. Dairy Australia’s award-winning ‘Dairygood for life’ campaign may provide a model for how to make this happen.

It is possible that in the future, the work that we are doing now may lead to joint developments among associations and, hopefully, a set of common dairy values held around the globe by both commercial and not-for-profit organisations. The essence, perhaps, of a global brand?

Such a position is quite a way off, and prior to even discussing the idea of collaboration, we need to achieve a consistent view on consumers’ similarities and differences among markets, against a set of common measures.

GDP is unlikely to be able to fund consumer research in every country in the world, but much consumer research is already being carried out. We are seeking organisations already carrying out generic consumer research that should consider aligning their assessment of the market to a common model, in addition to their own analysis of the data. This will add value to the information collected by making it possible to benchmark the local market against the international picture.

To look at the possibility of such a system, GDP has been working with Dairy Australia and its agency McKinna Associates to start to construct a database of consumers’ attitudes. The analysis Dairy Australia is carrying out is compared against the same set of consumer drivers used in the highly successful ‘Dairygood for life’ campaign.

This work is being closely coordinated with the IDF Standing Committee on Marketing and IMP, since these groups represent most of the agencies involved in generic marketing of dairy around the world.