It’s going to be a milestone year for the Marketing Research Foundation (MRF), an independent non-profit company, acting as the custodian and repository of research expertise for marketers and their advertising industry partners.
2022 is already in full swing for MRF. Four releases of the Marketing All Product Survey (MAPS) are planned for the year, with the earliest penned for this month, comprising the October 2020 to September 2021 fieldwork period.
‘The last two years have been full of challenges for the MRF, most notably, all the stops and starts that we as an industry and a country have endured,’ said Virginia Hollis. ‘We believe that 2022 will be a milestone year. MAPS will continue to improve and as requested by our subscribers; we’ve started developing a new segmentation tool. A word you will hear from us extensively this year is ‘collaboration’. We started the collaboration process in 2021 and we are looking forward to cementing our relationships with other Joint Industry Committees (JICs) this year.’
The MRF has successfully released the first four sets of data, which has given the industry a full years’ worth of data. It is important to reiterate that the MRF have a strict scrutiny process and no data is released to the industry without being reviewed by the research committee, which comprises of both internal and external industry professionals.
‘We are currently also working on changing the data layout to ensure a more user-friendly experience on the software platforms,’ said MRF’s CEO, Johann Koster. ‘Some of the improvements will be seen in this February release, and we welcome any feedback you might have.’
The preliminary MAPS release schedule for 2022 is:
– February – October 2020 to September 2021 fieldwork period.
– May – January 2021 to December 2021 fieldwork period.
– August – April 2021 to March 2022 fieldwork period.
– October – July 2021 to June 2022 fieldwork period.
In January, the MRF hosted a webinar with subscribers and MASA members to discuss the much-needed revised South African segmentation tool. This process is underway, and more workshops will take place over the next month or two. The foundation’s aim is to feed the output of these engagements into the collaborative work being done with other JICs and arrive at a uniform approach to consumer segmentation.
‘This is single-source data at its best: all the demographic, intermedia, behavioural, product and brand data, in one survey and all in one place,’ concluded Koster. ‘We believe that this is going to be a great year for research solutions in South Africa, especially establishing MAPS as the go-to research for marketers.’
