Revamped AC Nielsen to charge clients more

To cover more towns for retail audit.

Clients of AC Nielsen ORG MARG should get ready for an increase in subscription fees. The country's largest market research firm is revamping its operations, overhauling its market research methodology and expanding the coverage of modern retail formats, apart from covering more towns and cities for its retail audit.

AC Nielsen ORG MARG is also looking at the option of introducing wholesale audits (which will take into account wholesalers selling to the end-consumer directly).

So clients will have to shell out more for this value-added service. The revamp was launched after the agency set up a client council six months ago to understand clients' needs in detail.

Russell Farmery, managing director of AC Nielsen ORG MARG, told Business Standard: "One of the important initiatives that we have decided to embark on is to broaden the panel by improving the representation of modern retail formats like food retail chains in our retail audit data."

This is primarily because of the surge in the growth of these large retail chains in the last two years. Farmery added the agency will expand the panel factoring in changes in population revealed so far by the government after the census and also by taking into account India's newly formed states.

The company will now be adopting the ratio estimation method of calculation, which would facilitate weighted adjustment of any change in sample.

This method replaces the previously used numeric projection factor method of calculating sales estimates.

For instance, when a particular store replaces another in a given cell of the sample, its sales volume may not be exactly the same as of the previous one. Ratio estimation adjusts the change in the sample with greater precision.

The two products of AC Nielsen ORG MARG are retail audit and customised services. Retail audit covers the fast moving consumer goods, telecom, lubes and cycles industries.

With pack sizes mattering in the FMCG sector, AC Nielsen has introduced the recording of additional new attributes like pack sizes and attributes for product variants, which would allow marketeers to assess the performance of the pack size and achieve a better understanding of the market and the performance of segments within and across categories.

Following the global take over of ACNielsen by Dutch media conglomerate VNU, the parent company of ORG MARG India, both the companies are yet to be merged legally, though both the companies' services are consolidated. The company has several joint ventures for retail audit of durables (ORG-GFK), pharmaceuticals (ORG -GFK) and media (TAM).