The Marketing Research Foundation (MRF) has released its latest update. January saw the introduction of the potential segmentation model workshops with marketers from various industries. These were first hosted with the Financial Services industry (3 March), followed by the FMCG industry (10 March) and Retailers (17 March). There is clearly a need for a new model as over 100 participants representing 50 organisations took part.
The first quarter at MRF has been a busy period with a completed February release, while work continues on the upcoming May (full calendar year) release of the Marketing All Product Survey (MAPS), alongside ongoing segmentation workshops that will continue in April.
‘The MRF will continue to work closely with the Bureau for Market Research to refine and further develop a segmentation tool that is agile, adaptive and relevant across a diverse South African landscape,’ said MRF’s CEO, Johann Koster. ‘To this end, further workshops with industry stakeholders are planned for April and marketers are welcome to reach out to join these.’
The February 2022 release (October 2020 to September 2021 fieldwork period) was released as planned. Although some of the new questions incorporated from 1 July 2021 were not labelled correctly, which caused some initial confusion, this was caught in time and a re-release of the data set was issued. The latest data set is available to all subscribers.
‘The next release (January to December 2021 fieldwork period) has been finalised for our internal scrutiny process,’ said Koster. ‘We are aiming for an end-May release together with an industry presentation.’
The MRF will also be undertaking a full audit of MAPS and its underlying processes, procedures and protocols. ‘With 18 months’ worth of fieldwork data available, we believe it the opportune time to subject MAPS to this audit’ said Koster. ‘We feel very strongly that MAPS should deliver on its mandate and by auditing now, it allows us to take any possible corrective steps while MAPS is still relatively young.’
‘We have finalised the audit framework and scope and have invited recognised auditors from across the globe to submit proposals,’ concluded Koster. ‘We are looking forward and excited to see the data for the May release as this will be the first full calendar year data set.’ Details will be released on the industry launch of this data next month.
