Tips and Essential Resources to Help You With Your Asian Market Research

To make sense of Asian markets and keep abreast of consumer trends and key developments within them, you’ll need to collate vast amounts of accurate, up-to-date information from a wide range of sources. Once you’ve collected a sufficient quantity of market data, you’ll need to organise it in such a way that it will yield useful insights for competitor analysis, risk management, and other business processes.

In this four-part blog series, we’ll cover all that there is to know about performing market research in the Asian business context—from traditional sources of information to the latest technologies that can elevate the process and yield more informed decision-making. Read Part 1 of the series. 

Organising Your Market Research

It’s easy to get overwhelmed with all the different types of information and sources that need to be considered in the market research process. Researchers often fail to “connect the dots” once they have amassed a large quantity of market data, meaning they are unable to arrive at useful conclusions.

This is why it’s important to have a clearly defined process for organising your findings before you even begin collecting market data.

There are many different ways to structure the market research process, but it is generally good to start by organising data according to:

1. Type of Information

• Sector reports
• Consumer/industry trends in the news
• Corporate profile

2. Competitive advantage

• Size of market & growth
• Key players & suppliers
• External factors (governmental policies, geo politics, etc)
• Technological trends 
• Your current positioning in the market 

In addition to organising market data into the above categories, it is advisable to:

• Create a logical naming convention, and
• Develop a system for filtering out irrelevant information

Note that corporate intelligence tools can be extremely useful for accumulating all necessary information in one place and organising it according to which bits are most relevant to your organisation’s objectives.

Essential Sources and Types of Market Research Information

As we have already established, effective market research involves various types of information and sources. Deciding which types are most important will depend on the nature of your business and your objectives, but the following list is a good starting point:

•     Country/sector/market reports
•     Profiles and descriptions of key companies, as well as information on:
  • Their ownership/shareholder structures
  • Their boards of directors
  • Their financials
  • Their subsidiaries and partners
  • Their recent activities

The above information can be gleaned from a variety of sources, including:

•       News and social media
•       Press releases and timely disclosure
•       Corporate websites
•       Third-party reports
•       Market intelligence providers and platforms

The above sources offer a wealth of valuable market data, but the way researchers collate and process that data is often scattershot, which means important insights can be missed. Moreover, when it comes to Asian markets, there are several hurdles to research, primarily due to a lack of standardisation in corporate disclosure and audit requirements, especially for private companies.

Collecting and processing data on such a large scale is extremely time-consuming and labour-intensive using traditional techniques. The magnitude of the task compounds if you’re working with multiple economies with the diverse and complex Asian business landscape. 

In the next article, we’ll zero in on the basic steps to research on the current landscape of an industry you’re following. We’ll also illustrate how technologies like artificial intelligence (AI) can improve your market research by bringing near real-time insights and accuracy for faster decision-making.