TGI research data launched

TGI SA has a sample of 15,000 interviews representing 16.7m individuals, sixteen plus, in communities of 8,000 plus throughout South Africa. The sample is representative of this universe in each of the six waves of fieldwork conducted between February and November each year. Matched samples of different people are interviewed in each wave.

According to Barbara Cooke and Tim Bester, licensees of TGI in this country,
"TGI is not a panel, but we do ask respondent's permission to recall at a later stage if necessary. This means our subscribers with difficult to find target markets, can use TGI to re-contact known individuals to conduct more qualitative or in depth research very cost effectively."

To support the launch, Sean Yeates, the KMR software Client Service Director in London responsible for the development of Choices3 for use with TGI, presented the results of the study to TGI subscribers and talked about the enormous value of the database as a strategic planning tool.

Yeates is no stranger to South Africa. He helped establish IMS here during 1997 and has vast experience in
working with the kind of software needed to support radio, television and print planning.

Four hundred and eighty users from the subscribing companies attended the launch presentations and will attend training courses during the following week.

Also here for the launch, is Delphine Stocks, who lives in Budapest and is responsible for Choices support in South Africa, will help train users. She is French and a graduate of Sorbonne University in Paris with a Masters degree in Economic Analysis and Models.

Stocks, who supports TGI Choices3 in ten countries, will initially work with Carol Banks of C-Search to train the users on Choices3 to get the best from the data base as quickly as possible. Banks will manage on-going training and has set up a help line desk.

According to Cooke, "Media planning will never be the same again. TGI asks respondents questions about 4750 brands and over 550 product categories. The research measures brands, attitudes, demographics, geo-demographics, activities, lifestyles and media consumption all in a single database. It has always been a source of puzzlement to me that South Africa has had to make do with brand planning based on category data. Skip and OMO couldn't be more different in terms of their user profile let alone their utility for the user. Yet the only brand planning measurement available has been the profile of users of non-soapy detergents (all washing powders)."

Now in seems planners can plan on individual brands from acne preps to yoghurt. Hold on, here comes a flood of data never before available to South African marketers.