Over the past few years, online research has become an invaluable tool in the toolkit of researchers across the world. By utilising online access panels, researchers have been able to conduct research faster than ever before. They have been able to rely on the masses of consumers belonging to online access panels and have been able to reach audiences that have been increasingly difficult to reach via traditional methodologies (e.g. the younger generation of 2.0 social networkers). Online access panels in particular have given researchers the possibility of conducting truly consistent, multi-national surveys across multiple continents at the touch of a button. However, with new tools come new challenges. With international work so far-reaching and so accessible, it is important to bear in mind cultural, national and online differences when utilising such online methodologies. Knowing the potential pitfalls with fielding an international survey can be the difference between success and failure. This paper looks at the wider considerations of using online access panels internationally, plus some of the considerations for both preparing and running actual surveys. In addition, it will examine the learnings from a recently conducted survey on the Olympic Games (The Olympic Interest Survey). This survey examined the ways in which consumers plan to use the internet leading up to and during the 2008 Summer Olympic Games in Beijing.
India is big and India is young. Its size and its demographics, together with the growth potential that India's economy is showing, have made it a fashionable market.Marketers from across the world and within India are betting high on these two aspects of the country. But these are also the two most critical characteristics of India that every marketer must examine carefully and get a real understanding of in order to make it a success in this country. India is big but is India one whole piece of a homogeneous market? Are there different segments in India which have distinct behaviour patterns? India is young, but is young the only marketable populationin India? If not, then aren't we missing a piece in the picture? Most of the marketing and advertising in India today is designed for the young mindset. When the entire country is being made to feel young, what's happening to those who are actually young?
Australia has been one of the countries at the forefront of the development of on-line research, and the industry estimates that at 30% of quantitative research, on-line is the dominant research methodology.The Australian industry has recognised the challenges market research faces in migrating to on-line as a dominant methodology. So, Australian researchers and companies embarked on a journey to combine the most up to date collective wisdom and create an actionable standard for Australia that will self regulate the industry. It is currently known as QSOAP (Quality Standard for On-Line Access Panels).Both authors have been on the Task Force that has finalised a Standard accepted by research companies, panel providers, quality groups and clients over the past 18 months. The key goal of this group has been to develop a set of best practices that will help ensure good quality online research is undertaken in the Australian market.
Video has become ubiquitous. Shooting in a digital video format is now within the realm of the mass consumer. All it means is that researchers need to lose their chains of objectivity and start looking at research as a form of narrative. Identify and focus on the story being told, and if possible, involve the consumer in creating that narrative. If we are living in a world of consumer generated content, why shouldn't research too be a part of that phenomenon?
Culture, as we all know (sometimes rather disastrously!), is a powerful mediator across a range of marketing activities. The aim of this paper is to present thoughts on enhancing communication effectiveness for the Indian market by sensitivity to key characteristics of the Indian personality, e.g. the tendency towards greater emotional expressiveness and intensity, a higher need for saving face or overcoming shame/shyness; and the relatively higher acceptance of authority.Our premise is very simple: communication can engage the consumer at three basic levels: the head, the heart and the soul/value-system. How can we engage better at these levels to ensure more effective communication for the Indian consumer?
If the pundits are to be believed, China and India will rank as the world's first and second largest economies by the middle of this century, surpassing those of the United States and Japan. But surprising as this may seem to some, it merely marks their return to positions they enjoyed for centuries prior to the industrial revolution in the late 18th century. Over the next fifteen years, according to the EIU's Foresight 2020 report, more than half the growth in the world's GDP will come from China (27%), the United States (16%) and India (12%). They are, by any definition, the economic powerhouses of the global economy.
Everybody is talking about us could well be the song for new media! With explosion of new media options notably online media there has been a general feeling of optimism and opportunism when one looks at the concept of new media. But decisions have been plagued with anxiety, insecurity and helplessness. Even if one acknowledges the relevance of new media beyond just critical mass, one is confounded by the relative lack of control and the correspondingly increasing power the consumer is wielding when it comes to engaging with the new media.Synovate decided that the only way to make meaning out of all this was to go ahead and actually conduct a study to understand consumer's motivations in engaging with all media old/established to new/recent media. The motivational framework of Censydiam was used effectively to help plot the United Kingdom as representative of the Western market and Singapore first and then Thailand as representative of the emerging Asian markets. The experiment is ongoing and in the future we will have many more markets to plot on the media landscape and derive more insights.
Wealth is being created in Asia at an unprecedented pace. In 2006, five of the top ten countries with the fastest growth in millionaires are Asian, including the top three; Singapore, India and Indonesia. The number of Asian billionaires grew 32% in 2007, double the growth rate for the rest of the world, which was 16%.These growth numbers are exciting enough, coming from a recent low base. But is there a critical mass?
As the world becomes a smaller place, and brands become increasingly global, it seems almost evident that we are living in a single continent rather than many. There seems no better benchmark to this phenomenon than youth across the world. Seemingly, they look the same, they dress similarly, the personalities seem to be congruent and their expressions of issues remain largely identifiable across the globe. They have given birth to global brands like Levi's, McDonald's, Nokia, Coke/Pepsi, Nike, and many others. They say that food is a very local differentiator, but youth today have blurred this dimension too with their adoption of global tastes and brands. Hence marketers can be led to believe that global strategies will succeed phenomenally well when addressing youth as a target group.However, this cannot be further away from truth, especially when dealing with youth in emerging markets of the world like India, China, Mexico and Brazil. On the one hand, each of these markets has been facing a deluge of western influences in the last decade, but on the other hand they have a very strong traditional backbone which is ingrained in the youth at a very early age and influences his/her thinking and behaviour.This has led to a clash of global and local cultures within the emerging markets. We have observed this clash with a keen interest. Through five different studies conducted in these markets, we have been able to gauge the extent of the clash.
China's online population is on the brink of overtaking the United States as the largest in the world. Growing at six million users a month (10 times the pace of US internet growth), China's internet users, who are predominately of a young age, will constitute the world's largest internet market by the close of decade. This paper focuses on understanding the behavior and culture of China's young internet users, a driving influence on future internet developments in the Asian region and globally.
Most conversations and presentations about Web 2.0 have focused on Western examples, typically from the United States and Europe. Companies such as P&G, Lego, Albert Heijn, and Unilever tend to get most of the press, along with US-originated services such as Wikipedia, eBay, YouTube, FaceBook, and MySpace.However, this Western focus on Web 2.0 ignores the fact that the largest global internet footprint is that of Asia. As of late 2007, North America accounted for 19% of all internet users, Europe 27%, whilst Asia accounts for 37% of all internet users. Moreover, the growth in the number of internet users in Asia is much faster than Europe, and nearly three times as fast as North America!This paper seeks to shift the focus of the discussion away from the Western markets and to look at what is happening in the Asia Pacific region, and in particular with respect to Chinese language activity.
The fortune at the top of the Asian / Indian pyramid has been an established notion for some time now, with more and more affluent urban Indians (like other Asians) being in the market for luxury goods and highend technology products. This is where most marketers, especially in high-end categories, have initially focused. However, given the sheer size of the base of the pyramid, the bigger fortune does indeed lie there, and it is time for these industries, particularly telecom, to turn their attention here. But doing so is not an easy task, despite the optimistic statistics in circulation, because the magnificent growth posted by the telecom industry has actually scratched just a fraction of the surface. The real opportunity is much bigger, and finding the right buttons to convert it is a tricky task. This paper presents a case study that attempts to provide direction on factors that will spur further growth in the low income / rural markets in India.