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Debnath Guharoy, regional director, Asia, Roy Morgan Research, joined JWT Kolkata on his 20th birthday, fresh out of Delhi's St Stephen's College. In the 16 years that followed, he was at the helm at JWT Colombo, set up JWT Jakarta from scratch, and finally ran the Unilever account across Asia out of Hong Kong. Having lived and worked in six countries in Asia, he has been an agency partner, a dotcom entrepreneur and recently turned researcher after a lifetime of using research. Today, he is responsible for taking the 60-year old Roy Morgan Research into Asia.

Guharoy shares his views on the research business in India with Prajjal Saha of agencyfaqs! and talks about the company’s Asia plans.

Edited Excerpts

My responsibility is to bring the 60-year Australian research company to Asia. We first ventured into the Indonesian market to test our Asian capabilities because it is a forgiving environment. We have been in Indonesia for six months now. We have a robust database that is being validated by different people and the industries.

We know we have a very successful product. This gives us the confidence to come to an even bigger market India and tell the captains of Indian industry and marketers that we can work here as we have proved that our research works in a similar developing environment.

Yes, you can say that. But the logistical challenge in Indonesia, as compared to India, is much greater as it is a large country with water in between. One can't just take a bus or a train to reach out to places. So, managing Indonesia was more of a challenge. And in spite of this, we got it right.

If our methodologies weren't right in India, we would be dead across the continent. Then, no body would give us a chance in China. We have proved our worth in Indonesia; we will prove it in India and our next destination is China.

If it was that, then why is an independent Australian company – which has all the leading research companies of the world as competitors – is still in business. Why is that all other multinational companies that are present in Indonesia didn't do what we have done?

How is it that we walked into Indonesia and became successful in just six months? It is because of the product itself. This is not a car, which you can strip down and say 'I can make it'. Market research has seen an evolution over the past 13 years and ace professionals from each of their respective fields have perfected it. So, each industry template has its own evolutionary history, which we are transferring now into Asia.

So, there is collective learning and there is evolution of a time. I am pretty sure that experts in each country will make it even better and work harder in the local contest. What we bring to the table and what our competitors do are not the same thing. The only similarity is that it's ‘research’. It's a single source and what we do in a single source is a unique asset.

Our estimate today is that it will cost $2.5 million a year to run this operation. This indicates where we got to go.

The number of clients we have is the benchmark of our success. We are ahead of what we expected to be in Indonesia. The validation of our information is a success. We are not producing information that is being challenged or ridiculed. It is information that can be validated and we have been proven right. No other entity can produce the pieces of information that we provide.

I would like to believe that the same will be true in India. Our research will be validated by various industries from bankers to airlines to FMCGs. And, if we are not in step with reality, we will be dead. In any case, this business lives or dies every 90 days when the data gets updated.

The research is called Single Source because when we interview consumers, we not only ask their demographics or their preferred brand of chocolate or their readership habit. We ask questions across 50 industries and across 150 categories. It is extensive and three interviews are done with the same person over a period of seven days. This is the only way; we can make our information connect without guessing.

Let me ask you one question. Where do you think people have more time – in India or in Indonesia? If we could successfully do it in Indonesia, we can also do it here.

One should always remember that we are all humans. Respondents give us their time because it is his/her desire to be heard by the government and by the guys who make their chocolate or automobiles. This is what makes them speak and not the incentive that we give.

We are not here to replace TAM or compete with the IRS or NRS. We are here because we are the only reliable source to understand a consumer holistically.

The second very important distinction is that we are a diagnostic tool for any banker, carmaker or a FMCG manufacturer. We are not a readership survey or a tool for ad agencies to profile their products or understand the consumer from an agency's perspective. We are far deeper than that.

Please understand that we are not in the business of nightly or weekly reports of share of television viewership. But we have a large sample size. And, we can confidently say the name of the programme that a person, planning to go on a holiday to Goa, would like to watch, or his choice of article on a particular segment in a daily on Sunday.

Customised research? Not at all. Single Source is a syndicated ongoing survey. One can,, of course, use the machinery for customised survey, but that's an additional jump and not a primary feature.

The primary feature is to provide high quality and high volume data, which can be connected across the board. One can connect several data such as how many credit card owners are planning to use a car, or how many of them are planning a holiday abroad, and which is the airline they would travel with.

Through our survey, you can see voting intentions in a particular state, consumer confidence, and also get answers to several questions such as what people think about corruption, the government, or how deep they feel about the environment, homosexuality or even drugs. It's a complete understanding about the consumer and that too it’s reliable like no other entity.

I would put it like this: If the questionnaire fell out of my briefcase and somebody else does a survey based on those questions, will it automatically produce the interactive capabilities that we have? The answer is: No as one can just ask the same questions. And, no one can expect the data to fall in place by itself. There is a huge amount of learning and expertise that goes behind making a research work – the way it needs to work.

Asking the right questions is an important bit. But even this can be also duplicated or replicated. You got to make the diagnostic tools work with the software, so that it gives you the right answer each time.

If anybody claims that there is already a single source research in the country, I would say that if that entity does 10,000 samples in a year, we would do it in a month. In short, our survey is far more reliable, which means one can use multiple variables and still get reliable answers.

My critics cannot say that since I have the questions and the software, it will naturally produce results. If it was so simple, we wouldn’t be in the position we are in.

I will share an anecdote with you. If you look at the top advertised categories in India, toilet soap is one heavily advertised category here. Now, why is that toilet soaps are not advertised in developed affluent markets? I have never seen a toilet soap advertisement in Australia. And that is because overtime, certain products become commodities. And the assurance of the quality of that commodity is within the supermarket, where you find the product. The people in the toilet soap marketing business have proven to themselves that by advertising you create no additional demand. There is no return on investment.

In developing countries, one can create shift and increase market share by appealing to certain groups of people and make them want one toilet soap to another.

This is how a typical consumer assimilates information. But 'Single Source' takes the guesswork out of the research process. Consumers in developing countries are more value-conscious driven by their necessity and are less brand conscious. But within the same value, there are brand preferences that one can make. Even among economy brands, say economy cars or economy airlines; there are choices one can make. This is because the multiplicity of choice is growing exponentially in every country and at every market.

It is difficult for me to make a generalisation. But I can give you an example. In developed countries and particularly the smaller developed countries, the level of research is so high that one can measure the return on investment in any thing.

A marketer can see how he is doing in each demography, in each geographical area, because of the quality and quantity of research. The fact is that there are digital maps for city after city, which gives the likelihood of that customer group being present in that city or than zip code. And that's how it has progressed.

But in India, marketers are spending millions of rupees today in every quarter without knowing their return on investment. The money is thrown in with the assumption that we are getting a return.

In India, the marketers can get away by using a shotgun because there is no accountability on the number of pellets that didn’t hit the target. In the developed market, you have to use a rifle because people would know where the bullet went because that’s the quality of information, which is available and this is what makes the data accountable and measurable.

But I can say that when we get down to business, marketers will able to use this product and afford this subscription from the savings that we can demonstrate. To prevent the wastage that they are blindly doing today – because they have no other options – the subscription will pay itself back in 12 months from the savings of the wastage.

To answer this, I will say that the world's largest single source survey exists in China, and not in one but in two parallel surveys.

But we will not even try to have a digital mapping in India because it is unaffordable to have the same ratio of sample size that we have in Australia to produce the same quality of information.

I am confident that one day we will get there because that’s what evolution is all about. There is a census and an electoral poll in India and we are going to work with what we have, which has got to be better than plain guessing. As the quality of census improves, the quality of our information will also get better at random.

Lip-service has got to be the number limiting factor! Other than a handful of seasoned marketers, too many people use research to gloss over the real facts, or as a crutch, or as an excuse. Million-dollar decisions are taken based on scanty research. Millions are thrown at vaguely defined consumers via advertising that could have been far more tightly focussed.

Today, I can see the Indian marketplace relative to many markets across Asia. As the economy races forward, with more money in the hands of more people, success will come relatively easy to many marketers. But there's a paradox I see in India that's perplexing, given the world-class brains that run businesses here.

Because of the immediate urge to cut costs, quality gets affected. At the same time, there is the uncontrollable desire to loudly throw millions on advertising, without being accountable for every rupee. Good marketing goes far beyond using Bollywood or cricket to build market share. Not enough professionals are stopping to think that millions could be saved with better and not more research, at the cost of nothing more than a week's TV spots, perhaps. As the need for accountability grows, so will the demand for better research to define markets. There will be more opportunities to design products better, communicate better, and track progress better.

The human race is adaptive by nature, we get accustomed to the context we live in. While researchers can take the initiative to introduce better techniques and tools, it is the marketers who have to voluntarily be more accountable. They need to ask the right questions, demand the right answers and pay a fair price for something as fundamental as 'knowledge'.

Multinationals bring tried-and-tested disciplines into local markets. Research prerequisites are administered universally, for local learning as well as international comparisons. The learning is transferred to people, who move on and positively influence their next workplace. Having said that, global instruments run the risk of becoming blunt instruments and the local managers and researchers need to ensure that it is equally sharp in the local context.

Five per cent of India is more than double the size of the Australian market for high-end products. For edible oil, there's no comparison. How hard can it really be to run a successful business in a growing economy of this size? The three biggest challenges have got to be the value-conscious middle class, the diversity of cultures within that middle-class across India, and the relatively limited access to consumer loans.

I'm obviously biased, but I don't know of any other research tool that delivers better value than large-scale, continuous Single Source as a basic tool. It's a must-have. It is capable of replacing many other bits of research that sit in silos, incapable of understanding both the marketplace and the consumer, holistically. That includes retail, which really shouldn't be about pack sizes. And it includes radio too, as a part of every medium that we capture.

The problem with different pieces of fragmented research is that you have to keep guessing or assuming inter-research relationships. That's dangerous as you could be very wrong! Single Source directly connects every factor, whether it is retail, media, attitude, sports, brand and consumer. Conducted on a large scale and costs shared by several users, Roy Morgan Single Source aims to be a reliable and valuable asset, every quarter.

Brands, like leopards, can’t change their spots. The brand personality needs to be constant without attempting to be all things to all people. Only those people, who have an affinity to the total offering, will reach out for the brand, even though they may belong to urban or rural India, or be male or female, young or old.