At Douglas Parker Associates our senior staff complement includes seven executives with wide-ranging academic backgrounds and industry experience.

We have our own fieldwork and data processing facilities, as well as a specialist GIS department. We make use of our own dedicated call centre in Cape Town that handles local and national telephone surveys using a CATI system.

Field Department

Our Field Department handles the physical execution of all primary market research for the company. This includes pilot testing questionnaires, preparing instructions and briefing the supervisors; checking, editing and coding completed questionnaires in preparation for data capture.

A network of part-time interviewers is maintained within a regional structure which covers the major metropolitan areas and most major towns in South Africa.

Data Processing Department

Our Data Processing Department is responsible for capturing questionnaire based primary market research data obtained by the field department and processing these to provide computer tables and cross tabulations as required by the research executives.

The computer programme used by the department is Survey System and tables may be exported into Excel for further analysis by the executives.

Geographic Information Systems (G.I.S.) Department

Analysis of data on a spatial basis adds an important dimension to ones understanding of market potentials and development opportunities.

All the major shopping centres and most of the retail chains in South Africa have been geo-coded onto electronic maps to show their respective locations.

We have also conducted customer origin studies at most of the shopping centres to determine the extent of their catchment areas.