“Know Your Customer.” It’s the mantra of GlobalWebIndex (GWI), a company that creates and administers the world’s largest survey on the digital consumer, representing 2.5 billion consumers in 45 countries. On this episode of #Brandstorm, we talk to Chris Hopkins, a sales development representative at GWI, about how to use its massive database to build out consumer profiles.
Humble Beginnings
Founder Tom Smith started GWI in a room in his house. Today, GWI has locations in New York, London, and Greece. He previously worked for MRM/McCann in the strategy, analytics and insights department. About the time social media emerged with MySpace and Facebook in 2006/07, clients began asking how they could get research about what consumers were doing and how they were interacting online. As an entrepreneur and visionary, Tom Smith left the agency to develop his own business model and dashboard. He reached out to thousands of potential clients about his company, but only needed one to take off. In 2009, Microsoft came on board as his first client and has been with GWI ever since.
The GWI Model
GWI creates its own surveys on a quarterly basis using panel providers around the world to administer them to consumers. Fresh, new respondents are used every quarter. The company’s goal is to gather the full digital life of a consumer. In additions to demographics, it also focuses on psychographics to understand the attitudes and behaviors of consumers, including purchasing habits, online activities, media consumption, interactions with brands and how much time people spend on Facebook versus Twitter.
Chris says the company offers its services primarily to advertising agencies, publishers and brands. The GWI platform, which is subscription-based, brings the data together and gives clients the tools to run their own research with the help of its team. The client provides the who and what and GWI gives the how and why.
With 35,000 data points, the dashboard can validate and segment audiences, and be used to collect data for new business pitches, avoid stagnation and find new growth opportunities. Chris tells us about Welch’s Grape, a company that had typically targeted women because it believes moms or females were the primary food shoppers. Using GWI, Welch’s discovered the primary shoppers were males and dads and were able to build a new campaign targeting them.
Connect with Chris
LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/christopherjhopkins
Phone: 646-565-7116
Website: globalwebindex.com