In a first of its kind in the MENA region, Magna Global & SUBWAY recently conducted a market study in the QSR (Quick Service Restaurant) category.
This lane-changing study was carried out through ‘Integration’, a company specializing in helping clients develop better marketing. Better marketing is more effective, more efficient and always accountable. Magna’s SUBWAY market study provided a regional launch pad for Integration’s proprietary methodology called Market Contact Audit (MCA).
As Hisham Ghazal, Head of Marketing, SUBWAY Middle East & Africa puts it, "As a brand that thinks fresh, the MCA study which helps give us a fresh outlook on the impact of media touch points on consumers in the UAE is almost a match made in heaven. Our focus is on fueling consumer engagement with the brand, which cannot be achieved without a deeper understanding of the consumer interaction with the different communication touch points.”
This region suffers from lack of operational data when it comes to the Quick Service Restaurant business: e.g. what is the level of consumers’ interaction with the category/brands across all touch points. Hardly surprising given that more than 90 active brands create around 900,000 TV spots and hundreds of millions of digital impressions in a given year, leading to communication overload and consumers lethargy.
As an agency that believes in the integral role of communication in building brands, and delivering ROI, Magna Global took a brave step by deciding to audit their performance and generate learnings to help reshape their communication strategy for SUBWAY UAE, and decided to team up with Integration and MCA.
Bassem Massoud, Regional Managing Director, Magna Global, said it all when he said, “We're delighted to have catalyzed this research on behalf of SUBWAY UAE, which has armed us with invaluable category and consumer insights that facilitated informed decisions and reshaped our communication and media strategy. Today, SUBWAY UAE is the only QSR in the region to have access to this wealth of information, and is testimony to how seriously we take our long-term strategic commitment with SUBWAY UAE.”
Today, MCA is the engine behind numerous industry solutions, centering on delivering Brand Experience Points (BEP) for all brand-consumer touchpoints and quantifying how they influence brand choice, how they contribute to brand experience and how efficiently they are delivering vis-à-vis the costs incurred. Such data is then used to develop benchmarks compared to competitors. With a globally validated single unit of measure, applicable to all contact points, the MCA will help SUBWAY UAE answer three fundamental business questions:
• How effective are my marketing communications activities and how can we improve?
• How efficiently are we managing communications and achieving sales?
• Are our budgets well spent and our decisions leading to improved performance?
In this region’s rapidly changing business landscape with the road being littered with hard questions about accountability, Magna’s SUBWAY study is definitely a milestone, with MCA showing all the way forward.
“At Integration, we were delighted to support Magna in their engagement with SUBWAY! We appreciated the agency’s ability to comprehend, internalize and apply MCA based learnings. Indeed, while the MCA delivers indicators of marketing & communications performance, it is only the agency’s creative and strategic talents that transform those findings into better brand activities,” said Oscar Jamhouri, CEO & Founder, Integration.
