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!

This is the second in the short series of posts on Challenges facing Qualitative research in China. As I said before, the idea is not to castigate research agencies or trash the ways of some of the marketers. Instead it is to highlight 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.

In this second part, I will share some thoughts about the way we ask the questions in our researches.

It pains me to see how we run our consumer immersion groups.

Why are we so direct?

After every response – we simply barge in with a “why?” or “why not?”

Do we really believe that people will give an honest explanation for their usual behaviour?

Add to this, people in China take much longer to open up than people from most of the other cultures that I have been exposed to. We need to respect this cultural truth. China is a lot about steady conversations and negotiations. It is not a “on and off” culture, it is not about this way or that way, it is not the start and stop mindset. It is a continuum. It is about maneuvering around and about topics – touching them enough to give a hint rather than making them obvious.

Our way of talking to people needs to learn from this.

My long-time friend once told me how Chinese and Westerners think differently. He explained it to me through a business meeting analogy. For the Westerners – if a meeting is short it must be very good because everybody was talking the same language and thus not much conversation was required to reach an agreement. Contrast this with the Chinese idea of a good meeting. The Chinese think that if the meeting is short – it did not really achieve much. The underlying principle is that it takes longer to know people and understand their motives – too quick and you have not really achieved anything. On the contrary, if it is longer – it sure means that it helped people know each other more. Knowing people is most important. All the business can follow.

Now think about our interview situations - how can we rush through it with a 100-bullet point checklist?

I often say – “In China – slow down, if you want to speed up.” Things move forward briskly when we do not labour them too much. Conversations are no exception. Of course we need answers to “why” and “why not” but we need not ask it that way. We need to make the questions indirect, help respondent speak about himself without feeling shy about it by. Make it less sharp and allow the real answers to flow in. Only a comfortable respondent is a natural respondent.

A few more to come in this series.

Happy Working!

From today I will start a short series of posts on Challenges facing Qualitative research in China. The idea is not to castigate research agencies or trash the ways of some of the marketers. Instead it is to highlight research & marketing issues plaguing various marketing and research systems & that if addressed it can lead to a way for a superior understanding of people in China and consequently better marketing  & market planning.

Why do we always have so many questions? Do we know so less or are we playing safe by getting the research to confirm even the most elementary things?

Fewer questions, shorter questions with more room for conversation are much better than long questions and many questions. Visualize our conversation with our friends and family - how we talk to them over tea and snacks. It is fluid, enjoyable and refreshing. It helps us know each other even more and it brings us closer. Now think about our last conversation with users - chances are

We had many more things to discuss (many-many questions)

We moved from one question to another very fast (completing a ‘list’ rather than striking a conversation and trying to understand)

We consumed almost two hours doing this and everyone was tired & irritable at the end of it (rather than becoming more open, refreshed and thus closer).

Why do we do this? Why are we so paranoid about not being able to complete all the questions in our DG? If we all know the marketing goal, the brand challenge and our priorities – then why don’t we allow the interviewer some intellectual & conversation autonomy? Why do we act like we just came from Mars and we need to be told everything by the research?

“If there is a shared vision –there is no need for supervision”, said someone, and if there is a shared vision, I don’t see any reason to be paranoid.

More on this in the posts to come, Happy Working!

Over the past few years, American research company HCD Research has hosted a national market research study of the effectiveness and likeability of the ads shown during the Super Bowl on their website MediaCurves.com.

This year the real-time results were available on the Media blog.

Participants of the study evaluated the ads shortly after they aired during the game on Sunday night. As the preliminary results came in, the online widget below, currently displaying the final results, updated itself with the ads’ scores and overlaying “curves” to represent real-time interest levels.

This year’s Super Bowl clash between the New Orleans Saints and Indianapolis Colts at Miami’s Sun Life Stadium in South Florida saw the Saints emerge victoriously with a full time score of 31-17.

Here is a breakdown of the advertisements and the interest levels they generated during the game.

As always, we welcome your comments.

Over the past couple of weeks I’ve revisited why I never pursued a career in research - it’s seriously hard work! However, many weeks of hard slog have resulted in a great pay-off, with the launch of the Asia-Pacific Digital Brand Index (DBI), a regional study of online conversations about major technology brands that Edelman APAC conducted with our partners Brandtology. All the details are on this site - but it spans eight APAC countries and incorporates 800,000 mentions of 233 major technology and telco brands, spread across over 4,000 online sites. Whew!

After looking through the data, we decided to focus on country-by-country launches and results, because (mock shock, horror), when you roll the results up at a regional level, the insights become less meaningful. If anything, this exercise has reinforced just how hyper-local social media environments, channels, topics and successful brand engagement really is.

It’s a point well-made by Blair Currie in a recent MEDIA post. However, my point is not that regional social media strategies are not important, but that any expectation that regional silver-bullet targeting, content and engagement strategies exist is misguided. The recent downturn really stressed local over regional and for social media this is also true. Regional marketers still have a very important role to play - esp. in terms of social media policy and strategy formation, driving best practice, benchmarking/measurement and central creation of strong online content. The more that regional marketers can gain a deep understand what’s hot in key markets, which people and sites are most influential for a particular topic and what other firms are doing that is successful or can be learnt from, the more valuable they become.

Shared insight and measurement also helps to better connect regional and local colleagues, so we hope that the DBI helps in the age-old debate about measuring the impact and effectiveness of social media. This is especially so in comparing the performance of brands in markets and across the region - that’s why we created a series of Indices that help local and regional marketers to find a common language and measurement benchmark around important areas such as conversations volume, engagement (or mentions per unique voice) and channel volume and breadth.

Just because I know you want to know, here is the ranking of the most discussed technology brands across the eight markets in Asia Pacific:

1. Google
2. Microsoft
3. Nokia
4. Samsung
5. Sony
6. Intel
7. AMD
8. Apple
9. Yahoo!
10. Dell

Disclosure: Edelman represents technology brands around the world, many of which are included in the Digital Brand Index.

With 800,000 pieces of data to review, there’s a whole range of other interesting insights, but more on those at a later date. Would love any questions or feedback you have on the DBI (apart from how bad I look on the below video, ok?!) - let me know.