MR a cultural perspective


Market research is a complex process which starts and ends with strategic issues and decisions faced by companies. However, in between there is an elaborate process that involves several different activities, often employing diverse skills and hundreds of people. It is inevitable, therefore, that the process will get tinged by the culture of the country where it needs to be conducted and the characteristics and proclivities of the people who are involved.

The Starting Point

China is a process driven society, where people like to think in simple, orderly steps. They are likely to clearly focus on accomplishing the tasks which need to be clearly defined. Chinese researchers expect the briefs to be clear and unambiguous – somewhat like the specifications to produce a piece of machinery. Ambiguity is something that the Chinese can do without.

In contrast, the Indian mind, quite like the country itself, is complex and likes to think, hypothesise and argue. Indians thrive on briefs which are strategic and non specific and addressing which involve a great deal of discussion and cogitation. Indian proposals often have several alternatives for the client to choose from – often as a result of the researchers failing to reach an agreement on which approach to recommend to the client!

The Japanese are closer to the Chinese, and really look for and respond enthusiastically to branded research solutions, which will magically solve all their problems. Indians in the region are least responsive to branded business solutions and demand a unique tailored approach designed for their unique needs.

Elsewhere in Asia, the situation varies, but possibly closer to China than India. In countries like Philippines, with a longer history of doing market research a strategic perspective is often applied and creative evolvement of the process often seen, but rules developed over the last forty years also come into play and some times act as a constraining factor..

Data Collection

In most of Asia, including China face to face interviews rule the roost. The reasons are many – including economic, social and cultural aspects. Telephone interviews, though much more prevalent than before, have failed to become as dominant a methodology as in the West. This is despite the fact that the telephone penetration is no longer an issue in many countries (including most of urban China). Culturally the idea of revealing your habits, likes and dislikes over a soulless, faceless telephone line to a stranger does not find resonance with the Asian mind. Asians love to talk – both face to face and one the phone, but the talk needs to be directed at a well defined, preferably a familiar face (preferably good looking too!). However, with increasing incomes, the residents of key cities in Asia have surrounded their homes with high walls and security making it more difficult for the interviewers to reach them. For easier access another form of face-to-face interviews, that is street intercepts, has become very common. However, with consumers becoming more and more busy, acceptance rates are normally low and the sight of an interviewer chasing a reluctant respondent makes a comic (though also a bit tragic) sight.

Mail interviews are only popular in Japan – not just because traditionally it was the only Asian country with a working and reliable postal service, but also the Japanese willingness to assiduously take up tasks and toil if the end objective is clear. In most other countries, market research is a matter of pleading and cajoling and physical presence of the interviewers in front of the respondents is a great help.

The traditional mail panels in Japan have now been largely replaced by online panels, though mail surveys are still used when the target group is relatively older (which is often so in Japan, as it is an ageing society and unlike in China, the money lies in the hand of the old). Online research has also become the dominant mode of conducting research in other relatively developed Asian countries such as Singapore, Hong Kong, and Korea.

China, which is seen by almost everyone as a pot of gold, online panels of variable quality abound. Claims are often heard of panels of enormous size and spread, who could answer every question that you may have. Of course, managed panels, where the flow of questionnaires is tightly controlled to the respondents to avoid fatigue as well as bias, and at the same time enough activity is undertaken to ensure that the panel remains interested and alive, are relatively rare.

With the caveat of reach and profile skews, Asian markets have taken well to online research . the research-on-research done by TNS suggests that the respondents’ answers in online interviews are actually more candid and even more elaborate than in administered interviews. However, it is also clear that special considerations need to guide the design of online surveys and it is not just a matter of feeding a paper questionnaire into a scripting programme. Relevant design considerations pertain to the amount of information a respondent can digest on a screen, the layout which is most effective, and probing follow-up questions which are most useful in eliciting the required response.

It is evident that the future of research in Asia is also online, and companies which invest in state of the art methods to recruit and engage the consumers are the ones which will thrive in the marketplace. Engagement based on permission based approach and interviewing is the key to obtaining reliable responses from valid target group.


Interviewers

Students are the major staple of the industry and the primary force for data collection. In most countries, another group of interviewers are from older women. In China these would be the retired workers from state owned enterprises, many of whom lost their jobs as these companies were suddenly given the unexpected and unplanned task of making money! These hardy interviewers are ready to take challenges that their younger counterparts dread. They will toil door to door in blistering sun or freezing cold or chase reluctant respondents on the road. In India, Philippines, Thailand and Indonesia, these would be the middle aged housewives, who do not wish to take full time employment but still want to supplement the family’s income (or have a little bit if money for themselves, away from the scrutiny of their husbands).

CATI (Computer Aided Telephone Interviewing) centre interviewers are relatively more stable and often seek long term employment. The TNS International CATI Center at Hong Kong resembles the general assembly of the United Nations, with tens of interviewers carrying out involved conversations in many Asian languages with respondents in different parts of the continent.

With online interviewing becoming more and more prevalent, the career of an interviewer may be of a limited life-span. In fact, what may be required is the development of online virtual interviewers – who may be even more hard-working and diligent than the traditional interviewers!


Focus group discussions

James Parsons cogently argues in the Research World July/August 2009, “Creating great qualitative research and brand understanding here in Japan requires us to understand the inherent contradictions that place the very enterprise of qualitative research as conceived in the West at odds with some fundamental aspects of Japanese culture”. Parsons further argues that “to ask a Japanese individual to express personal thoughts or feelings about a piece of stimulus, believing reflexively that they are valid, important and interesting, relies on dodgy assumptions”. In Japan, therefore, the conduct and analysis of focus group discussions need to innovatively address the cultural block and extract the required insights.

Chinese, though also traditionally a collective society, are also known to be conscientious, diligent and providing value for money. The same attitude is brought forward to focus group discussions by the Chinese respondent, who endeavour to provide satisfaction, even if it involves engaging in activities that may seem ridiculous or even foolish to them. In the end, however, the researcher goes back with information which at least appears to be rich – and the participants walk back with their fifty dollar pack, and hope that their animated performance will earn them another invitation from the research firm some time in future.

The “Argumentative Indian” (the name of a book by Nobel laureate Amartya Sen) was made for focus group discussion. Indians thrive in sharing their opinions, and even more refuting the arguments put forward by others who hold a different point of view. Indian participants of focus groups need to be controlled with a firm hand and channeled towards a productive discussion rather than a riotous argument, which is their more natural inclination.

The response factor

The consumer response to market research also differs significantly across Asia. In places like Hong Kong and Singapore, where perhaps every citizen has been interviewed several times, the response is expectedly less enthusiastic that in the villages of India and China, where any visitor from outside is seen with a mixture of curiosity and amusement. The most extreme example is in India, where the traditional hospitality may still get the interviewer a cup of tea and even some biscuits to go with it. However in the larger cities, this intrinsic hospitality is now threatened by a feeling of insecurity and fear of crime, and people are more reluctant to open their doors to strangers. In much of rest of Asia including Indonesia, Thailand and Philippines the respondent cooperation is still acceptable – and is inversely proportional to his or her income.


The market for market research

Japan which is the largest Asian economy is still the largest market for market research. Japanese companies look at marketing as a sub-discipline of engineering, which requires consumer input and diligently go about collecting it. India and Philippines have been traditional markets for research where the business was kicked off by companies like Unilever, which started of by having an in-house research department (complete with own field-force and everything). The relatively cold Indian government’s attitude to foreign capital did not encourage many multinational to rush to India for a long time, but Indian companies did take to research in a big way. Now the government is more welcoming and foreign companies are more interested in selling their wares in India and hence research is getting a further fillip. Giver the size and heterogeneity of India, research is often done on a large scale. The National readership study has been having a sample size of nearly 200,000 across cities and villages of India. However, the financial size of the market remains limited because of the relatively low price of market research.

The Chinese research market has been growing phenomenally and is expected to overtake Japan in the coming years. There are five key factors which are currently driving growth of the research industry in China are expected to continue to do so. Firstly, China is an extremely complex market to comprehend. The reason for the complexity lies in the high degree of heterogeneity within China as well as the complexity of the Chinese consumers. This implies that that marketers need to research more frequently in China and research a broader number of areas than in mature markets. The heterogeneity implies that the scale of research needs to be much larger in China than anywhere else.

The Chinese economy and the market is growing at a blistering pace. While in mature markets, once a market or a consumer segment has been researched, the markets can safely rely on the insights for a certain period of time to guide their marketing decisions. In China within a short period of time (some times within 6 months for fast growing categories) the market place is unrecognizable. Similarly the consumer, who is on one hand being exposed to such a rapid change and on the other hand is also experiencing the happiness of growing wallets, also changes rapidly in their decision making criteria and needs. Hence the Chinese market needs to be studied much more frequently than mature markets.

Elsewhere in Asia, some other economies like Vietnam have also experienced a ballistic increase, with a concomitant growth in market research. However, other Asian countries are more mature and the industry has also been experiencing modest though steady growth. On the whole, it is very likely that Asia will the future engine of the global economic growth as also the future engine of growth for the market research industry and the industry needs to invest more in developing further its expertise in feeling and deciphering the pulse of the Asian consumer.

Written by Ashok Sethi, TNS China