Micro sampling is the key element in round 11 of IRS: MRUC

"Our vision is to move away from being off-the-shelf data providers to value creators and insight enablers," says NP Sathyamurthy, director general, Media Research Users Council (MRUC). MRUC, along with Hansa Research Group (HRG), is working towards a January 2004 release of the round 11 of the Indian Readership Survey (IRS) and to this end it has incorporated a number of new elements in the study. "For starters," says Ashok Das, managing director, HRG, "we have sub-divided the socio-cultural regions (SCRs) in every state to increase the accuracy of the sampling process." The result of this improvement in sample design is that from 63 SCRs included in round 10, the figure is up to 158 ISDs or IRS Sampling Districts, says Das.

Apart from this radical shift in sample design, the forthcoming round will include sub-city reports for all major metros and edition-wise reports for all major publications. "We've always had a city report," says Das. "However, what we will do now is that for the top six metros, we will report parts of the city separately." For this purpose, the cities of Mumbai and Delhi have been divided into four regions while the balance four metros comprising Kolkata, Chennai, Bangalore and Hyderabad have been divided into two areas, one within the municipal corporation or MC limits and the other going beyond MC limits.

"The result of this exercise is that media plans will be more effective," states Ravi Kiran, managing director, Starcom, west/south, who is involved with the marketing of the product. "Guesswork will be replaced with discipline," he adds.

The forthcoming round will also include reports on Jammu, which is a first of sorts for the readership survey. Seven cities have been included in the overall list of units reported separately, taking the total tally from 40 in round 10 to 48 (after taking into account the state of Jammu) in round 11.

The sample size of the forthcoming round is over 2.20 lakh encompassing over 340 publications, nearly 200 TV channels and detailed information on radio, Internet and cinema. "There will be special emphasis on FM apart from new information areas added to press, television, radio and the Internet," says HRG's Das.

The forthcoming round will include special industry reports - the first, tracking consumer behaviour in telecom usage, and the second called Countryside, which is focused on the rural FMCG retailer. "Countryside will look at a rural retailer's profile, his shop's profile, stocking habits, media behaviour and so on," says Das. "With this information an important segment/channel will be covered," he adds. © 2003 agencyfaqs!