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- Consumer research group Kantar says South Africans are prioritising access to social media during load shedding, even as they spend less on food.
- Even though data in SA is relatively expensive by global standards, people want to be able to visit social media sites during power interruptions.
- People view data as an important currency to navigate the online world, but it is not as simple as choosing data over food.
- For more financial news, go to the News24 Business front page
Having access to data to search the internet or visit social media sites when load shedding hits appears to be as big a priority to South Africans as food is, says Kantar, the world's biggest consumer research agency.
Stacy Saggers, commercial growth director for Kantar South Africa, said on Thursday that the group's research had shown that people were "desperate to be online" during load shedding. Even with the "very difficult financial decisions that people are needing to make" to cope in a struggling economy, they were still choosing to use data, which in SA is among the most expensive in the world.
"Online has become the light in our darkness."
Saggers, who was speaking at a retail and consumer packaged goods event hosted by Google in Melrose Arch, said that the research the group had been conducting into what people did with their time when load shedding occurred had shown that even as people were "literally eating less" to navigate the high inflation environment, they were still prioritising data purchases.
In fact, Kantar's research conducted in April, showed a 71% net growth in "people spending more time on social media platforms than they did a year ago".
This comes even as the fast-moving consumer goods grocery basket of 116 key products had shown a decline of 2.7% over same period. The grocery category research was conducted by Kantar World Panel, the research organisation's shopper panel, which surveys an ongoing panel of 6 500 households in SA.
She said that as opposed to movie streaming sites, where consumers can download movies ahead of load shedding, visits to social media saw people having to consciously decide to consume expensive data to do so.
Saggers said Kantar's respondent profile was not limited to higher income households and 30% of households earned less than R5 000 a month. A sample of 500 connected South Africans were interviewed for the study.
"So this is not just for the super wealthy. This is the reality for our country. The other thing that people are doing as load shedding increases, is continuing to go on to search (engines) where you have to use data, so they are making the decision to prioritise data."
Speaking to News24 afterwards, Saggers said while it was not a case of people "choosing data over bread", the research did show that people were willing to spend significantly in order to be able to access social media during load shedding, while at the same time spending less on food.
"So, the main point of it is that data is a really important currency for people and that any access they can have to data is what they are looking for when load shedding hits."
She said that load shedding had also had a "big impact" on the way people worked, as well as the overall economy.
Kantar's research showed that only 13% of people in SA were "neither considering or hadn't taken up some form of supplementing their income", which showed how difficult the economic environment is.
