Kantar launches East Malaysia panel

Kantar, the world’s leading evidence-based insights and consulting company, announces the launch of their East Malaysia in-home panel, the widest coverage to date, including total Sabah and total Sarawak. It will provide a holistic understanding of shopper behaviour across the whole East Malaysia market.

The new in-home panel applies a 100% smartphone data collection method via a specially designed application called PanelSmart with barcode scanning function. This enables 1,000 East Malaysian households to conveniently provide information on their actual purchases (not claim or recall) over 100 categories to answer the what, when, where and who behind a particular purchase.

With longer to travel from their houses to retailers, almost 50% of trips for East Malaysians are big shops. They need to optimise each trip and so tend to buy more categories per trip. This means cross-category interaction is high in East Malaysia so pairing categories is an important consideration for brands. They also tend to have a larger household size as East Malaysians have multiple families living in each household and they buy more categories to cater for different members.

The new panel will also help to better understand the impact of local cultures on East Malaysian choices for fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG) categories and brands. Hari Gawai is a significant occasion when East Malaysians celebrate their harvest and is comparable to Chinese New Year. At this time categories such cold beverages like carbonated soft drinks will see more traffic.

This panel expansion will be able to support both global and local clients with a better understanding of shoppers’ interactions with brands and retailers to help them discover new opportunities for growth in this fast-developing market.