BBC conducts first upmarket survey

Sabil Francis

agencyfaqs!

NEW DELHI, December 6

The Horizon 2000 upmarket survey conducted jointly by BBC World and Starcom in association with ORG-Marg, looks at a cross-section of India's elite who make crucial economic decisions. The survey, conducted in the six cities of Mumbai, Delhi, Calcutta, Chennai, Bangalore and Hyderabad, included 4,791 men and women, between 22 and 54 years of age, who are professional graduates, or postgraduates, who live in homes with both cable and satellite television, and who have a monthly income of Rs 8,000 or more per month.

The survey was conducted between June and August 2000 and the results will be made available free of charge to the advertising clients of BBC. "Our intention is to provide our clients with a profile of this elusive and attractive advertising target. There was always a gap in market research at the upmarket level, as other surveys were either too specialised, or the targets were too small," says Jeremy Nye, head of research, BBC World.

The survey looks at such things like the time spend by the respondents on TV, the programmes and channels they preferred, and the amount of time the respondents spend on the Internet. The occupations that were included in the survey were doctors, lawyers, chartered accountants, engineers, software professionals, architects, university or college professors and scientists.

The survey gathered unique information on the daily schedules, breakfast habits, club memberships, air travel, vacationing, types of houses, work experience, banking and investment patterns, and alcohol consumption of the target group. In attitudes, there is information about work and family orientation, kinds of technology preferred, and openness to change.

The survey proved quite difficult to conduct. The upmarket adults were hard to find, being at the office, or at hotels, or socialising with clients, and tended to be non-responsive to a large extent.

BBC plans to make this survey an annual event. The first round, called the Horizon 2000 survey, will be followed by others along similar lines, such as Horizon 2001, 2002 etc. "India's professional elite are changing, and its professional elite will converge with the rest of the world. There must be someone who can track the changes. That is the aim of this survey. Horizon 2000 offers an insight into the behaviour of those Indians who will drive the economic revolution in the coming years," says Sunita Rajan, regional director, BBC World.

The survey found that among the target group, 42 per cent of respondents had a personal computer, with 85 per cent of those using the computer to access e-mail, and 35 per cent using it to source information. Nineteen per cent of the respondents had invested in the stock market, with 20 per cent of these carrying out transactions once every fortnight, and 53 per cent having invested over Rs 50,000. And, of the money made on the stock market, Rs 15,000 on an average was spent on vacations within India, and Rs 70,000 or more on a vacation abroad.

Says Ashok Das, president, ORG-Marg, "This relatively small group of upmarket urban adults wield an influence totally disproportionate to their numbers. The survey aims to track their behaviour."

© 2000 agencyfaqs!