Approach the kids market correctly - Running online research in Asia : 4

< Unstoppable lowering birthrate, aging society >
< Popularization of much higher education >
< "Parachute kids" booming - tween aged kids to start studying abroad >

These are some keywords relating to the children market and its real trend in the three now developed, main countries of Asia - Japan, China, South Korea.

Seeing various research conducted by our clients that seems to catch this wave and opposed to that, well, to be frank those that are "not following" this reality as well, we realize how the scene and situation in Asia is still an incomprehensible market especially in this category of kids and teens.

To be specific the major categories we see demand in this age group are definitely entertainment and education. While there are increasing amount of direct kids surveys and kids/parent pair surveys from our global clients, we strongly encourage to consider the following points.


1. Please make sure to clarify that the survey is for children, not the intial recipient. This note tends to be skipped, but remember that we are not able to send out directly to the kids, and by lack of the note our clients encounter massive amount of inintended screen outs.

2. Please expect there would be drop outs due to passing on from parents to kids. This cannot be helped as this method is the closest we could get to to approach kids on online surveys.

3. Please make sure to have the questionnaire translated into child-friendly language manner. For instance in Japanese, there are roughly two types of letters - Kanji(complicated Chinese characters) and hiragana/katanakana(simple syllabary characters). Kids start to learn Kanji from elementary school so do factor this into account.


According to our past feedback from various clients, we are very confident with our kids/teen survey data quality, however we'd really need our clients to work together in order to maintain the accuaracy.

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Watch out with the details - Running online research in Asia : 3

When it comes to respondent attitudes or sensitivity towards the survey structure, it's difficult to say what the difference is in between the countries. However from the actual project management perspective, recently we've seen some examples that may need some consideration when running projects in Asia.


- Order of the survey questions.

Specifically in projects run by clients in NA and Europe, we sometimes see the general profiling questions mixed up with the main questions. We do get the point that this will lead to gathering somewhat the "real" data, but from our experience this has actually led to respondents' complaints and confusion asking if it's an error, not that it will encourage severe drop outs but to leave them with questions and suspicion towards international surveys.


- Surveys that require downloading of files.

Maybe it's a needless to say point for some researchers, but considering the sensitivity towards online secruity of Asian respondents, this is something clients do need to be aware. Response rate assumption obviously needs to be confirmed with the panel supplier, and to prevent as much as possible for this to lower, we would need to assure no harm for the respondents in a transparent manner.


This is how detail-oriented panelists can be, and knowing it or not will change the results of projects, in both long & short term perspective.

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Timing Matters!! ---Running online research in Asia : 2

The holiday season is here and year 2010 is coming to an end. In Western countries, New Year is one of the biggest holiday seasons and is usually the time for family reunions. Likewise, numerous big events which are usually accompanied by many fireworks and illuminations are held in major cities around the world. Because of this, many people go back to their hometown to celebrate the New Year with their family. However, this is not the case in some Asian countries.

In countries like China, Taiwan, Malaysia, and South Korea, people do celebrate Solar New Year (January 1st), but Lunar New Year is given more importance. Lunar New Year is based on the ancient lunisolar calendar and each country celebrates the day in its own unique way.

In China, New Year is also known as zheng yue; the New Year Festival begins on the first
day of the first month and ends with a traditional Lantern Festival. The whole New Year Festival lasts 15 days and during this period, people usually return home for the family reunion. In celebration of the traditional holidays, people eat a lot of homemade food, exchange gifts with relatives, and set off firecrackers.

Korean New Year, commonly known as Seollal, is generally the same day as the Chinese New Year. Traditionally, people return home for the annual family reunion. Most of them travel home by car hence a very heavy traffic on highways is one of the most typical scenarios during this period. People in Korea commemorate this holiday by eating traditional foods, visiting family graves, and playing games.

With the recent rapid growth of the economy, travelling abroad during Lunar New Year is becoming more common in Asian countries. But despite this, the majority of people still return to their hometowns to visit and celebrate with their family and relatives.

During the Lunar New Year, most people do not spend time using the Internet and answering online surveys as much as they usually do. And the survey participation rate is quite low during this period. This might be a major factor that marketing research companies tend to overlook. Therefore, if you are thinking of running studies in Asia, we highly recommend avoiding fieldwork during this period.

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Translation Matters!! ---Running online research in Asia : 1

We are perfectly aware that language translation is always an issue when it comes to running surveys in Asia. As an Asian data collection firm we've received many surveys in Japanese/Chinese/Korean which are the local languages of where we have proprietary panels in. Looking at these surveys translated, there are some points we find importance in, to keep the whole survey to make sense in order to maintain the data accuracy and also to maintain panelist's loyalty towards research surveys.

Maybe these would be some points project managers may want to double confirm with the translation company before approval... "comprehensible" is the minimum, to ensure the data quality and sustain the valuable online panels in the region, we sincerely do like to request the focus into the points below.



"Usage of respectful form(honorifics) for personal pronouns and at the end of sentence"

At least in Japanese and Korean, and not as much but in Chinese as well, there are honorifics that do not exist in English language. What we sometimes see in commissioned surveys are, since the personal pronouns are literally translated, the respondent as in "you" being called in a disrespective manner. This upsets the respondent much more than you can imagine, so we recommend all personal pronouns that points the respondent "you" to be "anata(Japanese)" or "dang sin(Korean)".

Moreover, we do see questionnaires in imperative form to ask for answering especially at the end of the sentence... this is another obvious miscommunication point.



"Usage of pronouns"

Using correct pronouns to indicate something shown in the survey is important, especially when it comes to questions asking about multiple images. We do frequently see mistakes in both questions and options for this, which would affect research results severely.



To prevent data corruption and fraudulent response due to mistake from these fundamental language difference, we do recommend you to consult with your client to run a "back translation", how you have the "translated version" questionnaire translated "back" to English in order to make it possible to compare with the original version.

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