South Africa: Getting back on the map

09/April/2001

SAMRA (Southern African Marketing Research Association), under the vigorous leadership of the English-born Maurice Britten, who has been Executive Director since October 1999, is intent on beefing up the country's presence on the world MR map, where it bulks less large than its geographical size and methodological sophistication might lead one to expect.

This may be partly because of South Africa's present economic difficulties, partly because during the years of apartheid and Western disinvestment bodies such as ESOMAR (European Society for Opinion and Marketing Research) stopped thinking of the country as a suitable place for industry get-togethers.

Western disinvestment included the departure from South Africa of ACNielsen, which sold its operations to local management. It subsequently bought them back.

SAMRA, like Britain's Market Research Society, is an association of individuals members, who at present number 650. About 25% of them belong to client companies and 75% to suppliers of research services.

Unlike the MRS, however, SAMRA also acts as the umbrella organisation for the research agencies' association, known as the RSSA (Research Suppliers of Southern Africa), which was formed two years ago and has 51 member companies, and for the Research Users Forum.

What Britten has not yet persuaded the agencies to do is to come clean about the statistics of their business. In the absence of official audited figures one has to make do with educated guesses.

Total annual research expenditure in the Republic is, then, guesstimated to be about 650 million rand (roughly £60 million). ACNielsen, the biggest agency, is believed to have revenues of 100 million rand, thanks partly to its contracts with the South African Advertising Research Foundation (SAARF).

SAARF, which is funded by a 1% levy on media advertising receipts, pays ACN both to collect television audience data and to run the All Media and Products (AMPS) survey, which interviews about 30,000 people a year about their viewing, reading and purchasing behaviour.

The second biggest research agency, and the only major one based in Cape Town, is Research Surveys, which turns over about 75 million rand, and the third biggest Markinor, thought to do about 50 million, closely followed by Research Internationsl, with headquarters in Durban.

Other leading agencies include KLA (Kaufman Levin Associates), Impact Information, Decision Surveys International (mainly concerned with pharmaceutical market research),Ask Afrika and Plus94.

Jean Green, a veteran researcher and former chairman of both SAMRA and the RSSA, laments the fact that at least 40 potential member agencies remain outside the latter body and that there is a lack of co-operation between those that do belong to it.

The consequence, she says, is that is impossible to produce exact figures for the amounts of different kinds of research, "quantitative versus qualitative...business-to-business, consumer, medical etc. We cannot even present the ratio of face-to-face versus telephone versal postal interviews."

Maurice Britten is probably as qualified as anyone to coax the agencies into a different attitude, having worked for several of the larger ones.

Originally he was employed by the Courtauld textile group, which sent him from England to South Africa in 1968. In 1979 he was, on the strength of his knowledge of the textile market, offered a job by MRA (Market Research Africa), which subsequently merged with ACNielsen.

He stayed with MRA for five years and then worked for similar periods for Markinor and Research International before spending two years in Cyprus with MEMRB (Middle East Market Research Bureau) from which he was headhunted to run SAMRA.

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