Sherlock Holmes of the internet

A paltry one-tenth of my undergraduate class of final year students raised their hands in response to my question, "How many of you have read the newspaper this morning?" A decade ago, when staying updated, being competitive and having an edge at an interview could hinge upon possessing newspaper reading habits, placing advertisements in the dailies was sure to reach a captive audience. Today, however, with various forms of screens swiping away newspapers, marketers have been forced to tweak their tricks, or retreat. Don't get fooled into thinking that the basics of marketing have experienced astronomical changes, because they really haven't. What has actually changed is the form in which marketers now reach the new breed of gadget-wielding, attention-switching, hyper-connected youth of today.

How does this happen? Let's take a mundane slice of your daily doings, for instance, an innocuous status update, an accidental (or even intentional) like on a Facebook page, a random search for a song on YouTube. No matter how inconsequential you might think they are, these activities are anything but! 

Each one of those actions you perform in the virtual world, leaves behind your digital footprint, a trail that hungry marketers sniff at, and tediously track down to know more about you. Knowing more does not stop at your name, age and gender only. Information-hungry companies snoop further into the more personal aspects of your life that you (in a sane state of mind) would probably keep to yourself, things such as your family size, your kid's age, your income, where you go for holidays, which restaurants are your favourite, what kind of gadgets you use, and whether you are a Narcos fan. Companies go to great lengths to be on top of these information. 

So, why put the likes of Sherlock Holmes to shame when profiling consumers? That's because on average, a Bangladeshi digital consumer spends about 5.6 hours every day on social media and browsing the internet, while they spend 1.6 and 2 hours reading newspapers and watching television respectively (LightCastle Partners Survey on Digital Consumers, 2015). The bread and butter (and jam and omelet) of many companies depend on knowing these consumers, serving them and laying a first claim on their purse before a competitor can usher them away.

Say a new retailer focusing exclusively on branded makeup prepares a launch plan in Bangladesh. The traditional way of placing advertisements during target audience's prime TV viewing time, inferred from Television Rating Points (TRP), would only do the job partially. For the tech savvy millennial Bangladeshi youth, a greater strike rate is possible if marketers follow their clickstream rather than chase their TV habits. 

Just to drive the point further, the same class of my 20-something students displayed a certain apathy towards television watching, citing lack of time to be the main reason for not watching TV. Does that mean these youngsters do not consume news or entertainment? Of course they do. They are voracious consumers of contents and spend hours downloading movies, browsing social media sites, streaming videos, absorbing information like a sponge! It's just that they would do so when they want to, not per the schedule of the traditional print or electronic media. And wooing them requires some serious detective work!

The writer is a lecturer at the School of Business and Economics, North South University.