This is the third in the short series of posts on Challenges facing Qualitative research in China. As I have said in the posts before, the idea is not to castigate research agencies or trash the ways of some of the marketers. Instead the idea is to highlight the research & marketing issues plaguing various marketing and research systems & highlight that if we address these we can find a way to superior understanding of people in China and consequently do better marketing and market planning.

Have you ever wondered what kind of working people would take out time on a Wednesday afternoon (or morning!) to go to a discussion in a room full of strangers talking about sanitary napkins or tyres or adhesives etc for over two and a half hours? I can hazard a guess – these are people who do not have much happening in their personal or work life. Some of my not so polite friends have another word to describe these people – they call them “losers who don’t have a life!”

Come to think of it – who can take out so much time for a relatively unimportant topic and that too in the middle of a workday! These people are outside the stream of active social or professional life and thus have so much time to spare. They are the laggards in all kinds of product adoption processes. Outside of occasions like the focus group discussion – they are a conservative lot without strong opinions on most of the subjects – leave aside consumption choices.

This is the other challenge that a lot of qualitative research faces in developing markets like China. Most of the people that we end up recruiting for research are at best not savvy about the topic being discussed. This is dangerous because we base many of our marketing decisions on the feedback captured from these researches. When we do this – what we are effectively doing is taking feedback from the masses and ending up with the lowest common denominator of understanding. This might be a better idea in electing a government but it can definitely not help us make strategic breakthroughs in marketing.

Having said that – this also does not mean that we only speak with opinion leaders – that is not realistic either. What we really need to do is to structure our research in a fashion that we strike a balance between such dull followers and some savvy adopters. Learnings from only that kind of a mix can be considered more balanced and representative of the reality.

Only such a respondent mix can help us find inspiration not just information.

Happy Working!

Tags: china, china marketing, China Research, Consumer, Culture, Focus Group Discussions in China, Followers, Laggards, Opinion Leaders, Qualitative Research, research, Respondents

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 18th, 2010 at 12:46 pm and is filed under Advertising, Brand, Marketing. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.