1SEC: Done and Launching 2019

 Divide and… delight! The reality for any marketer and social policy maker is that needs and tastes vary across groups of consumers. However, for decades, how groups of households are classified varies from one research house to another. For example, the SEC grouping ABC can be 10% in one agency and 5% in a different agency.

 Good news: MORES is done and launching the first harmonized SEC instrument. The project is a major output of the MORES 1SEC Core Team and the MORES Research Committee under the collaborative leadership of MORES President Evelyn Aguilar in partnership with PSA’s Dr. Lisa Grace Bersales, research agency heads, academe and funding institutions.

Tech-Open. On the surface, the 1SEC is a technology-open, user-managed scoring system. Users can opt to use the tablet or paper-and-pencil to classify households.

Model-Based. The model is baed on the 37,000+ Family and Income Expenditure Survey (FIES) of the Philippine Statistics Authority (PSA) for 2008, 2012, and 2015. The first models were featured in 2012 as shared in the MORES National Congress. Then presented as a scientific paper in the 2013 DEVSTAT with Dr. Mahar Mangahas (SWS), NSO Chief Bobby Ericta, john Smurthwaite (ESOMAR, APAC) on the panel.

Massive Instrument. Pres-Test is a two-wave pre-test research participated in by MORES members. Wave1 was funded by the World Bank and assisted by the PSA trained and guided MORES in aligning questionnaire items with the national survey definitions. Several workshops were conducted to refine the first-cut instrument. Thanks to PSA and MORES leadership, Wave 2 pre-test kicked off in the wake of a typhoon, involving 10,000+ probability sample on no less the quarterly Philippine Statistics Authority (PSA) Labor Force Survey, covering urban and rural areas, for all the country’s 16 regions.

Scientific. The approach is a blend of classical ordinal logistic regression with 21st century machine learning and big data approaches (decision trees, bagging, boosting, neural net algorithms) under expert hand of the University of the Philippines School of Statistics. It’s based on a scientific approach employing statistical methodologies.

Future-Proofing. In an age where change will just happen faster, the 1SEC Team believes that the 1SEC should be an ongoing consumer segment standard check that’s a lock-step ecosystem between MORES, PSA, PSRTI, PSA, UPSS and the various agencies.