Aditya Chatterjee
Media

OMS wins gold from MRUC for innovative use of IRS data

The winner's fundamental hypothesis: The ability to spend by itself does not necessarily translate into spending

The Ahmedabad unit of OMS, Mudra’s media arm, is in a celebratory mood. It recently won a gold from the Media Research Users Council (MRUC), for its innovative use of IRS data to evaluate regional markets on three indices representing purchasing power, ownership patterns and propensity to spend.

Of the 16 entries that had submitted detailed papers, eight were invited to make a final presentation to the jury comprising of Roda Mehta, Divya Gupta, and I Venkat. Entries were evaluated and assigned scores on parameters such as objective of data analysis, conceptual approach, data software application to meet the objective, end result and clarity of thought process.

The eight entries making it to the final round comprised five agencies (OMS Starcom, Media Directions, Initiative Media, and Carat), two publications (Dainik Bhaskar and Malayala Manorama), and one advertiser (Coca-Cola).

Subsequently, while OMS bagged the gold, Malayala Manorama (Kottayam) won the silver award. The bronze, meanwhile, was shared by Media Directions (the media arm of RK Swamy BBDO) and Coca-Cola.

Nikhil Naik, business manager, planning, OMS Ahmedabad and Sandeep Vij, president - OMS, were the brains behind the study. The fundamental hypothesis: The ability to spend by itself does not necessarily translate into spending.

Spending is a function of purchasing power and the ‘desire’ to spend, which varies across geographical regions in a heterogeneous country like India. The study defined the desire to spend as a correlation of purchasing power with ownership of key consumer durables.

“We chose Kerala for our case-study because it is a low-earning market with a high propensity to spend,” explains Naik. Also representated was a case study of Delhi vs Mumbai. “In Delhi’s case, high income is exceeded by a higher propensity to spend, whereas in Mumbai, the propensity to spend matches the high income,” said Naik. The study can help marketers and researchers to construct their own network index, said Naik.

The presented approach has been actually implemented in prioritising markets for categories as consumer durables, automobiles, and high-end lubricants. “The approach is pretty simple,” said Naik. “You just need to have reliable data at your fingertips, which is available with IRS.”

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