Whether it is motor vehicles, pharmaceuticals or higher education services, it is vital to know and understand your product backwards, forwards and inside out before you start researching the market. In-depth knowledge and understanding of a particular product, service or market cannot be acquired overnight or by spending an afternoon touring a facility and watching a PowerPoint presentation.

At Turquoise, we work only in specific markets, each of which is headed up by research experts who know their specific niches like the backs of their hands.

It can be tempting to dive in feet first and start crafting questionnaires, working out profiles for focus groups and so on. Sure, that will all be necessary in time as nothing stands still, markets change and evolve, especially in the 2020s. However, there is no sense in reinventing the wheel.

For example, in exploring international markets for Higher or Further education, there is a wealth of information out there from social studies, research from the main employment sectors and even tech firms. After all, keep in mind that remote and blended learning is a core aspect of higher and further education, one that has been growing over the last two decades and has, of course, seen rapid acceleration following the unprecedented events of 2020.

As well as providing information that is of direct relevance to your research, secondary data also provides valuable context concerning the specific overseas market, its cultural similarities and differences to your home market and its general business trends.

Don’t just limit yourself to commercially gathered data. Government data can be a rich source of insights into the legal and regulatory challenges that might await you when you launch your business proposition in a new market. Of course it varies from one country to another, but valuable data along these lines is often freely available on government websites.

It is important to leverage the value of secondary data. However, at the same time, we must acknowledge its limitations. We said earlier that secondary data provides a valuable starting point, but once we have wrung all the value from it, it is time to move on to the next step. No two businesses are the same. Each has its own unique proposition to offer to its own audience. It follows that it also has its own questions to be answered and challenges to be met.

As you start to conduct your own research, whether it is through surveys, face to face (or video) interviews, focus groups or some other market research tool, by far the biggest challenge you will face is operating in a second language.

Sometimes the horror has had a tinge of black humour to it, such as Pepsi’s “come to life with the Pepsi generation” somehow being mistranslated for the Chinese market as “Pepsi brings your ancestors back from the dead,” or Mercedes Benz entering the same market with the brand name “Bensi,” meaning “rush to die.”

Sometimes, you can even fall into difficulties from one country to another without switching languages. The UK and USA have occasionally been described as “two nations separated by a common language,” as was demonstrated by the vacuum cleaner tagline “nothing sucks like an Electrolux.” It was a clever idea that worked well in 1970s Britain, but had a different meaning entirely in the USA.

In market research, you are safe from such high-profile blunders, but would nevertheless do well to take onboard how a small slip in translation can have a profound impact on your message. Sometimes a direct translation simply doesn’t exist for a particular word, leading to diverse interpretations of the same question.

Translation is one area in which you can’t cut corners and technology can only get you so far. Google translate or the clever translation app on your phone are fine when it comes to asking directions to the airport while on holiday, but don’t entrust them with nuanced market research. Always use a native speaker and a professional translator or interpreter before, during and after your research and ideally, double check your translations are correct by “translating the translations.”

If, for example, you are using a questionnaire, craft your questions in English, have them translated into the target language, and then have the translated questions independently translated back into English. You will be amazed at how some will have changed, even in the hands of professionals. You can then go through the same process with the responses to increase confidence that you have got the intended meaning.

Today, of course, we have plenty of tools at our disposal that allow us to conduct international market research without having to jump on aeroplanes. As is the case with every type of research, this brings benefits but also has limitations.

Prior to 2020, half of us had never heard of Zoom, but within a few months, octogenarians were using it with confidence. That in itself makes for an interesting study, but it’s one we will save for another day. The point is that if your grandmother can use Zoom for a remote consultation with her doctor, you can certainly use it for conducting market research.

It’s an invaluable tool, but it still has limitations. Conducting a market research interview remotely does not negate the need for a native speaker and professional translators. Neither does it eliminate the cultural pitfalls related to male and female interactions in certain cultures.

There is also the danger that by using technology like Zoom or Teams, you are inadvertently skewing your results. It is well and good for us to smugly talk about our 90 year old grandparents setting up Zoom calls, but it could be a very different story in your target country. If young, affluent and tech-savvy are qualities that check your target boxes, that’s fine. If not, be careful and combine your remote research with other methods.

It goes beyond remote interviews. Technology provides other opportunities for market research that can deliver fast results in high volume and quick time. For example, SMS surveys are quick, cheap and can have impressive reach. Of course, they will not provide the same level of detail that you get with other methods, and their brevity can lead to other problems.

For example, suppose you are researching Europe’s largest economy. Translating market research questions into German tends to lead to long words, it’s just the nature of the language. That’s fine when you are conducting in-depth interviews, but with SMS surveys, which are all about brevity, it can be disastrous. There is also the question of access – now mobile phone penetration rates are high in most countries, so this is less likely to be a problem, but still, it’s something to bear in mind when working with the developing world where mobile phone penetration rates are still hovering around the 50 percent mark.

Other forms of remote market research carry the same benefits and limitations. Online or mobile surveys are great as long as respondents can access them. For example, in the Netherlands, smartphone penetration stands at 93 percent of the adult population. In Pakistan, it is 19 percent.