Knowledge Factory releases AmpsPlus

Accurately identifying potential markets for products and services is a complex issue. To fulfil this need, many marketers rely on the All Media and Product Survey (AMPS) from the South African Advertising Research Foundation (SAARF), but this data identifies broad geographic categories and areas and does not drill down to manageable, targetable levels.

To enable marketers to focus their media planning and measure market potential and current market share in predetermined areas, Knowledge Factory has released its latest AmpsPlus data sets.

"To create the AmpsPlus data sets, we take the AMPS data and model it down to a suburb level," says Bernd Stachelhaus, senior analyst with Knowledge Factory, the customer insight services company in the JSE Securities Exchange-listed Primedia group. "We can then provide information on media usage, shopping patterns, financial services, motor vehicles, activities, leisure, furniture, appliances and clothing via predictive estimates for each statistic."

To improve the accuracy of the most recent figures, a new predictive variable, ClusterPlus, has been included in the collation of the latest raw AMPS data. ClusterPlus, a geodemographic segmentation system that breaks the 8 000 suburbs in South Africa into 10 homogeneous groups and 38 more detailed clusters, assists in breaking down data into smaller segments and sub-segments, uses a set of predictive variables based on data from census and deeds data.

"AMPS data is a modelled data layer, but it is too broad in its scope," adds Stachelhaus. "Improving its accuracy removes some of the estimations and guesswork and makes the results more reliable. The results are then extrapolated to our suburb framework using CensusPlus and ClusterPlus as a base.

"SAARF has excluded two modules in the latest set of data," adds Stachelhaus. "The organisation changed the data collection methodology of two product purchasing modules. It now leaves the survey with the respondents, who can complete it at a later stage at their convenience and then send it back to SAARF. Unfortunately, the change means that this set of AMPS data would not include a full year's worth of data for those modules and they were therefore excluded. They will be included again in the next report."

The new methodology will prove more useful to clients as it ensures respondents can take their time in answering product-related questions, perhaps even physically examining exactly what products they bought. The results then provide a more comprehensive list of variables with greater accuracy. Precision is improved and the time taken for each interview is not affected, even though there are more questions to complete.

New variables have been added to the data set by Knowledge Factory to enable the company to deliver results that are more accurate and pertinent to their clients. "Our profiles have to be as accurate as possible to ensure our clients gain the best response from their marketing activities based on AmpsPlus data," notes Stachelhaus.

SAARF releases AMPS figures every six months are. Then, using the results and the demographic bank, product usage and media responses are profiled. Through AmpsPlus, Knowledge Factory facilitates better decisions on ways to service consumers, maximising the identification of potential markets.