Data Fusion In a Nutshell

What do the following have in common: Rock and roll, the Sun, a slipped disc and chicken tikka masala? The answer is of course ‘fusion’, an adaptable word that conveys quite different meanings to a musician, a physicist, an orthopaedic surgeon and the man on the Boris bike. Our usage, data fusion, refers to merging two or more surveys by matching up respondents on common variables, or ‘hooks’, such as demographics, lifestyle, and media and product preferences. It has proven most useful for combining media exposure with product consumption data, providing valuable insights for media planning.

The main attraction of fusion is to avoid the commercial and technical difficulties inherent in capturing all the data of interest in a single-source survey.