Consumers don’t always do what they say they will.
If this doesn’t surprise you, then consider this: Australian companies spend more than $1.1 billion annually on market research using survey techniques that rely on consumers accurately remembering what they have done in the past and behaving exactly as they say they will in future.
When developed into insights, this information is used to inform strategic, operational and investment decisions for organisations of all shapes and sizes. CEOs and boards use it to plot future value for shareholders. Governments use it to inform economic policy.
All of it directly informed by surveys using information based on respondent recall, or what they intend to do in future.
Do you see the mismatch yet?
When you take into account that 38% or more of global survey responses are either fraudulent or unusable (Source: Kantar), the problem is exacerbated. Many brands continue to inform consumer marketing and strategy with fundamentally flawed assumptions about their opportunities, creating risk in the decision making and growth investment process.
There are two key steps to closing what is known in market research circles as the “Say-Do” gap. The first is finding a source of truth around actual behaviour, and the second is being able to link that behaviour back to the survey research.
Recent developments in Open Banking in Australia, provided via the Consumer Data Right, have enabled innovations in consumer research and have helped to close the gap. When able to see how individual consumers are spending their hard-earned dollars across brands and categories, researchers can measure and monitor consumer spend from those individuals over time and how that differs from their stated intent.
At Fonto, our 85,000+ connected members have been providing daily financial transactions securely and discreetly since 2021, allowing us to survey them based on spending patterns or about specific purchases they have made. This has opened the door to the world of measuring both how those consumers intend to spend their income, and how they actually do.
For strategists, insights leaders and marketers, the benefits of this kind of longitudinal research are immense. In late 2024, we asked grocery shoppers if they intended to spend less money with Coles and Woolworths as a result of the ACCC’s Supermarket Inquiry into predatory pricing. As expected, a lot of people said they would – 49%. Fonto then tracked these individuals and how their actual spend changed over time. Remarkably, while tracking is ongoing, it became difficult to discern any real change in spending behaviour between the group that said they would spend less money with these brands, and those that said they would not. If competitors had made marketing and supply chain investments based solely on the stated intent to reduce spend with one brand and shift to another, they would have been sorely mistaken. In fact, only the disruption of the supply chain itself changed shopper behaviour in groceries, with Woolworths losing share in Victoria in late 2024 resulting from industrial action in its distribution centres.
The future of consumer insights and marketing strategy requires the direct connection between individual statements of intent to a direct measurement of actual behaviours over time.
To find out more about how to use transactions data to survey yours and your competitors’ customers directly, reach out to the Fonto team.
