A month ago, the national broadcaster sent out letters (by post) to all sectional title owners in our building. They concentrated on the Staff Quarters. Someone, somewhere gave them a database of all property owners, with the official building name as given by the Surveyor General and the City. The problem with this kind of cold calling and unchecked and unverified mail is that the units are mostly used as storeroom and not occupied. How could they have gotten it so wrong. Furthermore, the original owner could have rented it out, so to accurately place the household in a demographic category may also be hopelessly incorrect.
The second problem comes when an unsolicited email is sent to a person, let us say a tenant in a shopping centre. The emails contains a “quick” survey. Some may complete it, some will take a guess at the questions instead of checking and verifying and when it gets to its original source, say the company, no checks are in place to verify the returned email for accuracy, completion, and verification. The same would happen if a retailer sends an email to a person who bought women’s clothing and the son completes it. You just do not know! While there are many checks in place, it is often difficult to quantify the level of accuracy.
Our company is starting to put together the first ever Sub-Saharan Directory of Shopping Centres. We try our best to obtain good secondary information so that there is minimal input to the receipient as this usually comes from Owners of the centre. We then follow up with an email with the corrected information as a signed off copy. It may look easy, but so many recipients now slide the emails into the “delete” box that we have to keep trying.
We love GIS, we use it, we analyse data on it and we aim to make it work for our Clients. Send us your experience to info@marketdecisions.co.za!
November 26, 2021
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