New Insights from War Room for Brands in Covid-19 Recovery

Mindshare Malaysia showcased a single view of market on recovery indicators and trends across multiple data points through a Live broadcast via The Loop on Friday, 3 July 2020.

The Loop, a Mindshare initiative with physical war rooms built in over 43 markets, enables agile planning and implementation for Brands by monitoring various data across market landscape, category trends, competitor movements and brand monitoring and trends.

This Live War Room session was an exclusive sneak peek for Mindshare Clients- To help them with the agile planning solution, where brand marketers can track consumer behaviours and trends to adapt their communications, campaign planning, media channel selection and content planning throughout the recovery phase of MCO and beyond in Malaysia.

Mindshare’s Recovery War Room analyzes multiple data points from Socio-economic indicators, people movement, TV viewership, social sentiment, search intents, digital consumption behaviours and more. And with this holistic view of market recovery, several key nuggets of insights were prominent.

• Observing traffic movement throughout states, Malaysians are beginning to come out of lockdown with increased activities in road traffic and public spaces visitation. Residents in Non-city centres like Ipoh are showing fastest recovery as traffic movement have returned to pre-Covid levels since early June with increase in movement in transit stations, groceries and parks mobility.
• With an increase in TV viewership during MCO lockdown, rural regions have increased viewership and new segments of appointment viewership like are emerging. Blue collar workers and students are showing increased and sustained levels of viewership through this pandemic.
• Social buzz shows slowdown on covid related chatter to pre-MCO level buzz. They key sentiment emerging has been the expression of gratitude towards life. There is some anxiety around post-covid economic impact but largely dominated with increased positivity and general hopefulness.
• Interstate travel and localized activities see a surge in search intent where keywords searches surrounding “hotels” and “bars” starting to gain momentum.
• Digital browsing behaviour mirrors consumer footfall with surge in Food and Drinks websites, especially 2.5X increase in Cooking and Recipe and 3X surge in Groceries content throughout the lockdown and still sustaining at higher than pre-Covid levels which shows that these interests will likely become a daily routine for Malaysians.
• Using browsing activities as proxy for recovery indicators, Travel & Tourism, the biggest industry most severely impacted in Covid times, has not shown positive signs of recovery yet.
• There are trends indicating “revenge spending” in some categories like Automotive, Beauty & Cosmetics, Fashion & Apparel and Luxury Retail.
• From a digital consumption perspective, E-Commerce saw a 3X spike during MCO weeks, and currently sustaining at higher than pre-Covid levels, indicating the online shopping behaviour is here to stay and is also now mainstream.
• Online video viewing and streaming have also seen a healthy spike, sustaining at promising levels, showing an increasing affinity towards OTT platforms for Malaysian viewers.

“From consumer mobility to online behaviours, Malaysia’s road to Covid recovery varies across states and consumer segments”

Mindshare’s Recovery War Room via The Loop will continue to monitor the nation’s road to recovery, continuously expanding with richer and deeper data sets across multiple sources.

Mindshare will be broadcasting its next live sharing of their Recovery War Room, next Wednesday, 22^nd July 2020 at 11.00 AM. To join, go here: https://bit.ly/msrecoverylive