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Follow UsLike last time, this year also, the Users' Choice Survey was conducted by IMRB. IMRB covered corporates, small businesses, and households for appropriate product categories. Like last time, attempts were made to identify the actual purchase decision maker, and put the survey questions to him or her, rather than just anyone.
The objective for the survey was to assess the choice of the Indian user when it comes to buying IT products and services.
Survey methodology
| Users' Perception Index |
| We have a cut-off of four percent votes for a brand to be reported. That is, if brand X got at least four percent of the valid votes polled in that category, then we report its score. Instead of reporting the votes polled, we have used the UPI (User’s Perception Index) to report the relative preferences for various brands. The UPI measures the relative acceptance of a brand. In each category, the winner–the brand with the maximum number of votes–is assigned a UPI of 100. The UPI of every other brand is expressed as the ratio of the votes they polled to the votes polled by the winner. For example, if brand X is the winner with 200 votes and brand Y has 50 votes, then the UPI of X is 100 (winner) and that of Y is 25 (100 x 50/200) |
The survey was conducted in the same 11 cities as last year. These are the four metros of Delhi, Calcutta, Mumbai, and Chennai. The other cities were Bangalore, Hyderabad, Ahmedabad, Pune, Cochin, Lucknow, and Patna. Together, these cities account for a vast majority of Indian IT purchases.
Over 2,000 interviews were conducted this time. Unlike before where a questionnaire was first sent to the decision makers, and follow-up was done over the telephone, each respondent was interviewed in person by trained field executives. The respondents were drawn from IMRB’s ITops database using random sampling.
The sample for organizations was distributed across different organizations based on their size, turnover, and type. The household sample was from SEC (Socio-economic Classification) A and B households only, as these are the households with maximum buying power. The questionnaire was open-ended and didn’t in any way, prompt the respondent for an answer. Nor was any indicative answer or list of products given, for the respondent to choose from. In other words, the questionnaire was as unbiased as possible. The respondents were asked three basic questions regarding each product category: which brand/vendor they were currently using, if any; if they were to choose a brand in the next six months, which would it be; and the reasons (out of a list of four) for that choice. The four reasons that the respondents were to choose from were price, quality, service, reliability, or popularity.
There are many products in the market. The categories that we chose are based on product areas that are relevant to a large cross-section of users. We actually covered more categories in the survey than are finally reported. Some of these ended up being dropped because of low purchase-preference by the respondents. Like every year, new categories have been introduced this year also.
Krishna Kumar