Stop Measuring Consumers, Start Understanding Their Behaviour Omotola Bamigbaiye urged Marketers
From shrinking pack sizes to price sensitivity and changing shopping habits, Nigeria’s consumers are sending powerful signals. Dr. Omotola Bamigbaiye says marketers need to stop looking only at the numbers and start listening to the behaviour behind them.
The Nigerian consumer may not always say what marketers want to hear but their wallets, shopping baskets and purchasing patterns are speaking loudly.
That was the central message from Dr. Omotola Bamigbaiye, Founder and CEO of Awesome Foundation, who challenged marketing professionals to rethink how they read the market at the General Meeting of the Ikeja Chapter of the National Institute of Marketing of Nigeria (NIMN).
Speaking on “Reading the Market: What Consumer Behaviour and Retail Are Telling Us That Marketing Isn’t Hearing,” Bamigbaiye argued that marketers risk missing critical market shifts when they rely too heavily on research reports, dashboards and what consumers say they want.
Her question was simple but pointed: “The market is speaking. Are our dashboards, research reports and boardrooms listening?”
The Gap Between What Consumers Say and What They Do
According to Bamigbaiye, one of the biggest challenges facing modern marketing is the growing gap between consumer intention and consumer behaviour.
“Consumers don’t behave according to our marketing plans; they behave according to their realities,” she said. She noted that the industry has become increasingly sophisticated at collecting and measuring consumer data, but measurement alone does not necessarily translate into understanding. For Bamigbaiye, marketers need to listen with “two ears”, one focused on what consumers say and the other on what they actually do.
“What people say is intention. What they repeatedly do is behaviour. Behaviour gives you a different layer of truth,” she explained.
Retail May Be the Marketer’s Missing Dashboard
Bamigbaiye also called attention to the wealth of intelligence embedded in Nigeria’s retail environment. From the neighbourhood kiosk to the supermarket shelf and e-commerce platform, she said retail offers marketers an immediate window into consumer priorities.
The growing demand for smaller packs, heightened price sensitivity, value-seeking behaviour and purchasing patterns shaped by consumers’ cash flow are not merely retail trends, she noted. They are signals of how consumers are adapting to their economic realities.
“Retail is not just where the product is sold,” Bamigbaiye said, stressing that the retail environment can reveal changes in consumer behaviour faster than traditional research cycles.
Five Signals Marketers Cannot Afford to Ignore
Bamigbaiye identified five critical signals marketers should be watching.
Value: Consumers are no longer defining value by price alone. Affordability, quality, convenience and the perceived risk of a purchase increasingly determine what represents value.
Trust: The credibility of a brand is increasingly shaped by experience and recommendation. Consumers may be more persuaded by someone who has used a product than by a conventional advertisement.
Convenience: Brands that reduce friction and make consumers’ lives easier from digital journeys to neighbourhood availability and seamless fulfillment are gaining an advantage.
Community: Friends, peers, creators and online communities are increasingly influencing purchase decisions, creating a powerful layer of social proof around brands.
Retail: Physical stores, informal outlets, supermarkets and digital commerce platforms are becoming valuable sources of real-time consumer intelligence.
The Real Job of the Marketer
Yet Bamigbaiye warned that collecting information is not the same as understanding the market. With consumers generating countless signals every day, marketers must learn to distinguish what matters from what merely makes noise.
“The marketer’s job is not simply to collect signals. It is to decide which signal deserves action,” she said. Her message ultimately goes beyond research and data. It is a call for marketers to become more observant, more commercially aware and more connected to the everyday realities of consumers.
In a market where economic pressures are reshaping what Nigerians buy, how often they buy and what they consider valuable, the brands that win may not necessarily be those with the most data but those that listen closely enough to understand what the data is really saying.
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