Day 257 - 06 Jun 96 - Page 26
1 A. Yes.
2
3 Q. Only 8 per cent of those eating out, is 8 per cent of the
4 44 million, eat at burgerhouses; is that it?
5 A. Yes, that is correct, yes.
6
7 MR. MORRIS: No, with respect. It is 8 per cent of the entire
8 market is burgerhouse purchases?
9 A. Purchases.
10
11 Q. But not 8 per cent of the population, only 8 per cent of
12 the population go to burgerhouses.
13
14 MR. JUSTICE BELL: I see, yes.
15 A. That is, indeed, correct, and the reason why we could
16 not initially answer the request to get to individuals is
17 the tables that we presented here in AF1 not only relate
18 to, as you correctly pointed out, 100 per cent of people
19 eating out and not the total population, they also include
20 within them frequency, people visiting with various degrees
21 of frequency, and not individuals. So, it is very, very
22 hard to make direct number comparisons. Although it sounds
23 as if there are inconsistencies within the data, the data
24 in its AF1 form is actually produced to answer different
25 questions that are being asked of it here and used in a
26 different decision making process, which is why we analyse
27 the data against a notional number of individuals to try
28 and answer the question that was asked of us.
29
30 We have no business reason to use a number of individuals,
31 we have lots of business reasons to understand our relative
32 market share versus advertising span versus competitive
33 activity, which is what accounts for the way the data is
34 reported in AF1. It is very, very difficult to make a
35 direct comparison between the two because the data is not
36 designed to provide that comparison in its normal form.
37
38 MS. STEEL: But I do not understand this. You have got an
39 eating out universe for the UK of 44 million, virtually?
40 A. Yes.
41
42 Q. Where does that figure come from? I know you said it comes
43 from the chart, or from the Taylor Nelson research, but
44 there is nothing in the charts that indicate the number of
45 people who are eating out?
46 A. In the analysis on the chart we are calling AF3, in
47 producing that chart we made no attempt to correlate it
48 with the earlier AF1 data.
49
50 MR. JUSTICE BELL: You started afresh, as I understand it?
51 A. We started fresh. We asked ourselves a series of
52 simple questions. How many individuals use McDonald's? We
53 took what we understood to be a strong representative
54 sample of the wider Taylor Nelson, or AF1, sample. We then
55 counted the literal number of responses against those
56 frequency breaks across the 8,764 interviews. We then
57 multiplied it by a factor that gave us a number equivalent
58 to the total population and then worked out the relative
59 notional -- and I stress notional -- number of people, and
60 relative percentages as such. There was no attempt in that
