Announcement due to the earthquake disaster in Japan

As been reported, a massive earthquake hit the Tohoku region of Japan on Friday, March 11th afternoon local time. As of now yet, the whole country including the Tokyo metropolitan area is under threat of continuous aftershocks and Tsunami caused by them.

However first we would like our clients and partners to know that we have confirmed the safety of all our staffs now based in our Tokyo Headquarter office.

We are still trying to get a handle of the situation, but in regards to the assumed impact to our services, we do need to make it clear that there is a very high possibility of delaying in progress of any projects now in field or those scheduled to be launched soon. In respect to our panelists and considering the situation, we will be holding from sending out any new survey invitations at least for the weekend, and for the policies from next Monday we will be determining according to the circumstances.

Our pricing team and project management team in Manila, Philippines will be operating from Monday as usual, and we'd like to assure that there will be no negative impact to the projects of other Asian countries we cover (including our proprietary panel in China and South Korea). 

Whenever we have further update in the situation of Japan, we will make sure to announce again. For any questions or concerns, please do not hesitate to contact us directly.

We truly appreciate all your kind consideration given and thank you for your understanding.

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LifeStyle Index - Instant Access to Chinese and Japanese Consumer Data

Though the Asian market is indeed one of the fastest growing markets in the world, it seems that only few researchers know what is actually going on in this unique region in terms of market insight. Therefore, it is always nice and helpful to have Asian partners who can provide you with vast local insight and market know-how. However, when you prepare a proposal and need those insights right away, it is often difficult to work with the partners on the other side of the globe mostly due to the difference in time zones, among other factors.


To solve this issue, Research Panel Asia (RPA) has released “LifeStyle Index,” an ASP service which in no time, allows its users to access, pull out, and analyze the data of consumers in Japan and China – the top two Asian markets. It enables users to have 24/7 data access on the consuming attitude, preference, and purchase behavior of the Japanese and Chinese consumers. In addition, it also lets its users to conduct a comparative research between these two countries. It is truly a helpful service, especially if you have projects in the Asian market.


LifeStyle Index, with its broad range of perspectives and useful functions, provides the research results on the lifestyle of Chinese and Japanese consumers. It is based on the results of RPA’s original surveys which were run using its proprietary panels. It contains the data of Chinese consumers located in the main cities (Beijing, Shanghai, and Guangzhou) with over 180 attributes, as well as newly released Japanese date with over 240 attributes. Additionally, LifeStyle Index allows users to create segments of consumers based on their target specifications, and make a comparison between these multiple segments. Simply put, it gives users a quick insight and valid market data to support your proposal in no time.


Currently, RPA is offering a 30-days free trial plan of the LifeStyle Index. Please sign up here to access your online consumer database of the fastest growing market.



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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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We are your Around-the-Clock Partner!

Without a doubt, Asia is one of the fastest growing regions in the world.
But because of the time difference, working with Asian partners can be sometimes troublesome. Imagine that you send an email to your partner in Japan at 10am EST, but chances are very low that they get back to you immediately because it's 12 o'clock midnight there. We are very aware that for almost all global companies, time difference is one of their biggest concerns.


Research Panel Asia (RPA) has taken this issue seriously and we are now earnestly working on solving this. April 2010, RPA has established an operation center in Manila, Philippines to support our clients around the clock. Currently, our pricing team operates 24 hours on weekdays. We are now aiming to expand our project management coverage as well. The first step is to officially cover all seven days a week by mid 2011.


To give a quick overview about RPA's operation center, it is based in Ortigas, the second largest business district in Manila, and is currently under operation with 12 operators. Having English as their second language, they are able to understand easily the clients' requests and inquiries and so are able to respond quickly and coherently. For us, client-satisfaction is the top priority hence we work very hard to offer the service more than expected for the clients. Being results-driven and having many fresh ideas, RPA's operation center continuously seeks better ways to improve the daily operation to meet our clients' needs.

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