This year’s ROOTS survey is themed ‘Coming Home – Rooted in Reality’ will be launched this month in Johannesburg, Cape Town and Durban.
ROOTS, South Africa’s largest urban, community level quantitative survey that provides marketers, advertisers, media and creative agencies with the intelligence and insights into buyer’s reading, shopping and leisure habits at local community level.
According to joint managing director of the Newspaper Advertising Bureau (NAB), John Bowles, the uses and benefits of this year’s survey are unlimited. Probably the biggest overarching benefit is that a deeper understanding of the market is achieved by zooming down to local micro communities and the ability to analyse many markets at local level. “Shopping behaviour in Fourways is most definitely not the same in Bloemfontein or even Midrand which is only separated by a handful of kilometres,” he says.
New aspects to ROOTS 2013 include an increased sample size, new areas surveyed, new categories and relevant questions. The sample in ROOTS 2013 is close to 30 000 interviews and covers over 115 local areas from Sandton, Constantia and Ballito to Polokwane, Diepkloof and Gugulethu.
Besides the usual datasets of demographics and general info, ROOTS digs deeply into other categories such as digital integration, activities and entertainment, and many retail categories from the non, semi durables to the durable and services line. It digs into the use of advertising and buyer behaviour – all at a suburban or town level.
“Today business is under tremendous pressure to make the right decisions,” says Bowles. “This can only be achieved by understanding the buyer and market’s habits, where they live, their demographics and behaviours. ROOTS is rooted in reality, providing critical intelligence about the markets where brands, stores or services are available. Geographic segmentation is the only relevant segmentation in today’s environment because it is real. ROOTS is real and is the tool to get to grips with the real battle on the ground.”
The ROOTS survey has started in 2001 so allows for the trending of data and the opportunity to see the changes in the marketplace over the last eleven years. Advertisers and marketers can define geographical catchment areas and analyse the nature of specific areas both demographically and by shopping behaviour.
“ROOTS can highlight the high incidence areas of categories like credit cards, life insurance or even burial society hotspots. Online businesses can figure out exactly where the digital savvy connected users are and target them accordingly,” says Bowles.
The survey also covers SA’s economic landscape comprehensively from established communities in the higher LSM groups to the increasingly important urban township markets. ROOTS 2013 will uncover the key townships of Gauteng, Durban and Cape Town as well as those in the growing towns of Polokwane, Nelspruit and Rustenburg where some real changes are taking place.
“To enable trendable data, we’ve used the same methodology as previous ROOTS surveys,” says Jacqui Tanton, manager at NAB and Caxton’s CIS (Central Intelligence Unit), “but in terms of sample size we’ve increased our total interviews of PDMs (Purchase Decision Makers) from the last survey’s 23 000 to just under 30 000.”
The launches take place on 11 April 2013 in Johannesburg at the Bryanston Organic Market, at the NSA Gallery in Durban on the 16 April and culminates in Cape Town at the City Bowl Market on the 18 April.
