Official Newsletter of The Research Pacific Group
Greetings to all from The Research Pacific Group!
Due to the pressures of business and ongoing client service demands we had for some time failed to keep up with ongoing news generation and sending of these bimonthly news mails as we used to; Having actually been prompted by many of our clients who told us they enjoyed receiving information this way, we are now back in 'production' !!
Research Pacific Japan new qualitative studio launch
Research Pacific Korea new offices, ' studio and CATI centre
Language Services Unit set up in Research Pacific's Singapore HQ
This month's Commentary.....'Beyond the big numbers in China's internet story'
Research Pacific Japan has opened its own Consumer Insights studio, "The Qualitative Connection" in central Tokyo!
A stone's throw from the beautiful Ueno Park, the famous Yushina Shrine, and the buzz of Akihabara, the location is ideal for visiting clients as well as for respondent access.
Designed with both respondent and client comfort, and high levels of service in mind, in addition to all the normal facilities, we have a fully equipped kitchen and more; Please go to the dedicated web site at www.thequalitativeconnection.com for more information and/or e-mail us here for more info about our full range of qualitative and quantitative services in Japan; japan@respac.com
Research Pacific Korea recently moved to new Seoul offices, in Kangnam ku, one of the City’s most important business districts. In this sprawling traffic-challenged city, a kilometre or two can make a huge difference to both visiting clients as well as respondents attending interviews or groups; Our new offices are perfectly situated at a major transport 'hub' ,have ample parking nearby, and are close to western style 4/5 star hotels;
Inside we have invested in the best high end technology for a new Consumer Insights studio, with wireless audio for client listening in viewing or adjacent meeting rooms, plasma screen projection, web streaming and more; In addition to the technology, we have a highly experienced qualitative team of on-staff moderators and interpreter and we have especially strong expertise in health care/pharmaceutical and IT domains.
And although telephone interviewing is still not readily accepted by many audiences, it is becoming possible to do more work this way than before, and multi-mode [CATI + web] works rather well, so Research Pacific Korea has thus also set up a small CATI hub of 8 stations but these are expandable if needed for larger scale studies.
Click here for a short photo tour of our new Seoul office and for more information about RPK services or for a quote request please e-mail us here; korea@respac.com
In Singapore at Research Pacific Group HQ we have created a new Language Services Unit (LSU) to handle the myriads of issues surrounding translations, transcriptions and interpretations.
Headed by Grace Wei, this unit will work across all Group businesses to ensure high standards of language work at every stage of our surveys. We believe this is an area which in many agencies is not given enough attention, with too many instances of lost meanings or mistranslations due to lower than optimal skills of the people doing the work...often researchers rather than true language professionals, or contract language staff at agencies who do not understand the research context.
The LSU brings together the understanding of the research process with a pool of people properly trained in their respective languages and managed to specific action standards we have set for first round, second round and back checking of ALL language outputs whether questionnaires, verbatims or transcripts.
Grace is a graduate of Shines College (Singapore) with BSc in Business Administration. She is effectively bilingual in English, Mandarin and several dialects, as well as familiar with Japanese and Korean.
Pulse of Asia Polls were launched at the end of 2008 as a new ongoing PR initiative, to be conducted regularly with a representative quota sample of 7 key Asian metro market adults, on current affairs or topical issues;
All interviews are conducted face to face in local languages or dialects by our in-market field forces, and only with freshly recruited respondents, we do not use on-line panels or other methods which would in many of these markets always result in biased samples.
The recent polls available include;
- Satisfaction with public transportation services
- Awareness Knowledge and Interest in major sporting events upcoming in next 3 years
- Attitudes to Product Safety [Food and non-Food]
- Attitudes on counterfeit vs. genuine brand purchases for several diverse product categories
For more information about these polls please email us at: Pulse_Of_Asia@respac.com
This month's market commentary, "Beyond the big numbers in China's internet story" is written by Irwin Hankins, Group President & Managing Director Greater China.
‘In the last weeks while travelling in Europe I have been struck by the fact that wherever I turned, in English, German, French, even Polish, and of course, international, news media, as well as ad & marketing press, the story of China's 'almost 300,000,000' internet users has been omnipresent!! In many of the publications one cannot help but note the sense of something between euphoria and hysteria, about how this means that western marketers will soon be able to reach all these people (and presumably sell them things!).
Frankly, one is reminded of the old saw in the America of the early 70s, 'if we could only sell everyone in China a (widget) we would make a fortune.’
Both the old and the modern statements share a truth [yes, that sure is an awful lot of zeros at the end of that number!!] but just as the olden days statement overlooked a lot of realities [the key word in that sentence having been "if"] so does the new sense of enthusiasm for all these 'net users'
Let's look at some facts?
First if we get past the zeros, and look at %% then the 22% [roughly] of China's population who are 'users' isn’t that great in percentage penetration terms and is way behind neighbouring markets, and only on par with the global average, and WAY behind many OECD markets;
And as we will see below, a 'user' in China may be very much different to a 'user' in western markets. The huge 9 digit number fomenting all this excitement is simply the sum total of all the people in China who have a unique ID.....and may well include some double counting...........but more important to a rationale discussion of what all this means are the following key data recently released by Cinic;
a. more than 2/3 of these users are under 30 years of age, and a staggering 1/3rd of the total are actually [officially] 10-19 youth , [although some could be even younger]
b. What is even more interesting about the latest data released in the Chinese net use report is the growth rate in past year has almost entirely been these youngsters [with 20-29 segments actually shrinking] and some marginal growth in the older segment…… [there are a sizable number of older people who have learned to use, even over 60s, but %-wise they are still low-incidence].
c. We need to consider economics; Unsurprisingly given the age profile the majority of this user base earns very little money....43% either don’t earn or earn less than 1,000RNB per month......they are unlikely to be buying many goods or services online for a long time to come.
d. Also we need to consider how the Chinese 'use' the net?
Well, firstly we need to note that the vast majority don’t have home connections, or any fixed connections of their own at all.....nationally, data show that fully 42% connect from net cafes, and 21% from their work; And an increasingly large proportion use their mobile phones for basic access......[of course there is overlap and cross usage not revealed by these data, but the main point here is that relatively few Chinese enjoy home based surfing or have 'always on' lifestyles.......a 'user' in these statistics may well be a poor rural person who logs on from a net cafe in nearest town once in two weeks to keep in touch with a family member in another province]
Next we need to also understand the nature of use; a significant proportion of these youngsters barely do any activity beyond gaming and messaging......in these statistics a young guy who goes every night to his local 500 seat 'gaming cafe' ...and does little else……… is still a 'user’
This is not so say that there is not huge potential in the future, but we feel from a general marketing POV it is rather important to place some context; Also, as it has been found in other research, it is a relatively small proportion of Chinese, low double digits, who ever surf a foreign web site...the vast majority of activity is purely domestic site access.
From an MR point of view, it will after considering the above data instantly become apparent why the internet is still not the best medium for doing balanced representative samples of the Chinese population at large, no matter what some companies wish to claim.
For further information about this commentary or about our China services in general click here; china@respac.com
For more information please contact us at respac@respac.com or view our website at www.respac.com