India's MarketPulse Rebrands as Kantar Worldpanel

Kantar has completed its upgrade of the Indian MarketPulse consumer panel, first announced last year, and have rebranded it as Kantar Worldpanel. The panel is operated jointly by the Kantar Worldpanel division and sister agency IMRB International.

10,000 new households bring the panel's total size to 79,400 and allow the separate reporting of new states such as Jharkhand and Chhattisgarh - it also gives better representation of what the firms call the 'Elite households' in towns with a population over one million. The panel is also the first in India to use insight drawn from the 2011 Census, as well as the MRSI's socio-economic category consumer classification. Also new are more granular category definitions and full integration where required with regional and global Worldpanel data including that from Europe, Asia, Latin America, the Middle East and Africa.

The alliance of the two firms was first announced in October 2013, and combines local market knowledge from IMRB with international expertise and global perspective from Kantar Worldpanel.

According to IMRB International SVP Hemant Mehta, 'The new service will help our partners better realise the new world of insights now available to them through the alliance with the consumer panel leader Kantar Worldpanel. Many shoppers' trends currently happening in India have been tracked by Kantar Worldpanel elsewhere across the globe, which provides additional understanding to anticipate future shopper and consumer behaviour.'

Andy Parkinson, Development Director, India at Kantar Worldpanel adds: 'India offers tremendous opportunities for global brands that want to play a role in the development of a huge market which is undergoing rapid socio-economic change. We want to help our clients to take advantage of these opportunities which is why we chose India as a priority market to invest in.'

MarketPulse was established in 1981, just ten years after IMRB itself, which now has 53 offices in 18 countries.

Web sites: www.imrbint.com and www.kantarworldpanel.com .