Running Research Communities in Asian markets

Online Research Communities (MROCs) are the new star in market research.
These online platforms connect a company with a group of interested
and interesting consumers to collaborate with them in qualitative
research projects. With the rise of social media, Asian consumers are ready,
more than ever, to co-create the future of brands and products/services. Are
Asian companies ready for it as well?
This paper shares tips, illustrated with cases, on how to successfully
collaborate with consumers in Asian markets.
What to
expect?

Many brands are looking at the Asian
markets for growth opportunities. According
to Bloomberg, five of the top ten emerging
economies lie in Asia. China, Indonesia and India
are leading the pack. It is the rising middle class in
these regions that creates business opportunities.
Consumer spending in a country such as
Indonesia, for example, is already close to the
levels in developed economies (McKinsey
Quarterly, 2013). With these fast economic
developments, Internet adoption rates are
increasing rapidly. Today, no less than 45% of
Internet users live in Asia (Internet World Stats,
2013). When it comes to social media, Asia
continues to be of significant interest to
marketers, brands and anyone with an
interest in social trends around the globe.
Asian consumers are ready for co-creation
Our Social Media Around the World Study
(InSites Consulting, 2011) shows that in Asia,
six out of ten social media users are connected
with brands and 90% of them want to help
brands in co-creation activities. So, not
only do consumers want to connect with
brands, they also want to collaborate with
them. 30% of these people prefer to
collaborate via a closed online community.
These developments offer great opportunities
for online market research, such as Online
Research Communities (MROCs) or Consumer
Consulting Boards, as we prefer to call them.

Online Research Communities:
types and applications
When positioning Online Research Communities or
Consumer Consulting Boards in the social media
research space, we should distinguish them from
the ‘natural communities’ and ‘social networks’
where content and conversations self-generate
between consumers. Researchers can tap into
these for knowledge via ‘social media netnography’
methods such as social media listening, scraping
and ethnographical, qualitative observation.
Online Research Communities assemble
consumers purposefully through consumers
who wish to engage and co-create with
brands. Communities are ‘invitation only’ and with
a marketing and research motivation. These private
research communities focus on a specific
product category, brand or customer
segment.
Online Research Communities allow
marketers to observe, facilitate and join
conversations between consumers.
Consumers enjoy this more participatory research
approach and the interaction re-introduces the
social context often missing from other research
approaches that conceive the consumer as
subordinate and approach them in a top-down
isolated fashion.

ongoing), intensity of
moderation (longer-lasting
communities are less intense or
community panels are even just
a form of access panels),
direction of conversations
and the number of research
techniques used (ranging from
synchronous online discussion
groups to surveys, diary blogs
and one-on-one interviews).Table 1
In terms of taxonomy, several labels and definitions for research communities are used in practice these
days, which may lead to some confusion - some may even debate whether all of the labels classify as real
communities. The labels range from online research communities over Market Research Online Communities
(MROCs) to bulletin boards, blogs, community panels, etc. (see Table 1). What they do all share is that they are all
some sort of asynchronous discussion platform but they vary in terms of duration (short term and ad hoc to

When we compare research communities to the traditional qualitative methods such as a focus
group, it is the long-term, asynchronous connection that creates interesting benefits.
Where focus groups only give a snapshot of reality, research communities enable participants to
think and rethink over time, beyond one’s first reaction. In order to identify the key benefits
of this relatively new method, we use a simple but very useful framework. This
framework enables to check the method effectiveness on three levels: ‘automational’,
‘informational’ and ‘transformational’ benefits (Day 1994; Grover et al. 1996; Mooney et al. 1996).
1.
2.
3.
Communities may bring automational effects because, for example, communities allow to quickly
tap into a sample of consumers on a specific topic that presents itself, which makes getting
the answer to a specific question more efficient.
The informational value emerges from the fact that the inherent quality of consumer
understanding we get is of better quality. Consumer input is multimedia, embedded in people’s
lives’ context as well as more reflected and reasoned.
Transformational outcomes of research communities lay in the fact that research communities
allow participants to perform tasks which were previously not possible without the
asynchronous technology and engagement over time. We are now able to follow people over a
longer period of time and co-create products or services with them from start to end.

As mentioned online research communities can vary in terms of duration and intensity. But when do you need a short-
term community and when a long-term one? As is often the case in research it depends on the management and the
marketers’ and businesses’ research objectives. Research communities can be used throughout the marketing
mix for understanding, developing, implementing or optimizing marketing offers (see Figure 1).
For consumer insights, communities are
used at the fuzzy front end of product
innovation or for consumer immersion.
In a development marketing phase new
value propositions are developed for
product concepts, brands or activation
campaigns. Implementation
communities are organized when
products or services are about to be
launched and need testing in the
market, e.g. for beta testing or in-home
user tests. Finally research communities
can be used for gathering feedback on
customer experience and satisfaction
processes.Figure 1.

In situations where managers have one very specific goal, a short-
term community will often suffice to satisfy the research needs.
The fact of the matter is that for running a successful
community one needs a show or a screenplay to keep the
engagement with and between all stakeholders. Concretely,
with only one very specific management goal, it is hard to keep up
momentum and activity. If on the other hand managers have a
combined need or want to have a continued finger on the pulse
with their target group over the longer term, ongoing communities
are more suited. In other words, the number of underlying
management objectives directly determine the activity plan
of a community.

The status of Online Research
Communities today
There is still some level of friction between the ability and
the desire to conduct research communities in our industry.
The status of online research communities today is
comparable to teenagers and their first sexual
experience. Everyone says they are doing it, everyone
wants to do it… but in the end no one really knows how to
do it well. This situation is reflected in the Greenbook
Research Industry Trends 2013. 45% of researchers
indicate having plans to use online communities in
the future (ranking 1st out of 17 emerging technologies),
while 40% of clients claim the lack of knowledge is still a
limitation for them (GRIT 2013). Hence, there is a need for
an overview and some concrete tips on how to run
online research communities - and specifically on
how to run them in Asia.

It is not about technology
Often the focus these days lies on technology
and tools while the common ground that
should be shared by real communities is
engagement. Unlike Internet access panels,
participants in a research community talk to each
other as well as to researchers and marketers.
Consumers exchange ideas in their own consumer
language and raise questions and answers which
researchers sometimes did not even ask. In other
words, the social context and interaction is
important and provide a holistic
understanding. However, this can only be
achieved by creating an engagement at different
levels. First, there is a need for natural
engagement which implies that consumers
have to identify with the topic or the brand
under investigation.
A second form of engagement that is required is
method engagement. This implies that
researchers should ask questions in a fun
and challenging way to increase
participation and quality of input (e.g.
gamification, infotainment, challenges). Finally,
research communities need to create impact
engagement and impact at the client
management side.

Engaging with participants - natural and method engagement
Many practitioners focus on the absolute number of people they connect with
in research communities. While important, we argue that sample size is
subordinate. What is really important is the number of interactions
per discussion thread which can only be created through engagement
with consumers. Setting up an online research community is technically
easy, but in order to make interactions useful and effective, researchers need
adequate processes for (Schillewaert et al. 2011):

Natural engagement
1. Purposeful sampling. Researchers are advised to create natural engagement by sampling brand
fans or consumers who show an interest in the topic when recruiting for online research
communities. True, these consumers are “biased”, but at least they reflect an illustrative consumer
reality and generate in-depth discussions.
2. Small is beautiful - better short and intense.
Depending on the research objective, research
communities can last a few weeks or months or be
ongoing, they can have 50 or several hundreds of
participants; it depends. But one needs to be aware
that longer and larger communities need higher
engagement and require more resources.
Lurking can increase with too many participants or an
over-whelming number of posts. A paradox? Not
really. When participants see too much information
they disconnect because they are convinced their
opinion has already been voiced and will add less or
no value.

Method engagement
1. Adapt the context and environment to the target group. For example, let participants choose
colors and the name of the community or put topics and questions on the discussion agenda. Foresee a
social corner (next to the actual discussion space) where participants can interact ‘off-topic’. If required,
moderators should guide participants this social corner. That is when a community is for and by
members.
2. Build the community. Once participants are screened and recruited, ‘kick-off’ sessions are
important to build engagement on both a social and an informational level. Such sessions discuss the
research agenda and objectives, the client is introduced and the participants become acquainted.
If not naturally present, engagement has to be created via the research methods used:
3. Moderators should develop the C factor - the “C” of Community manager. Good
moderators have good writing skills, are creative and apply “social medial” in human interaction.
Moderators need to be aware that community discussions can last too long and moderators need to
pay attention to steering interaction. There is an important role for researchers and
community moderators in building identification with the community, keeping up the
engagement with the topic to keep the discussion going while not letting members over-socialize and
drift away from the researcher’s agenda. Too strong social relations among members of a research
community can be counterproductive as they lead to irrelevant conversations.

4. Engage as many stakeholders as possible. Engaging members of the marketing team, senior
management or a well-known expert from the industry or academia to participate in the discussion spurs
activity levels tremendously.
5. What we ‘do’ to people is as important as what we ‘ask’
them. Give participants tasks to perform and play games with them
which generate insights. We can make people generate
information for us by introducing more fun elements and
creativity. In his book 0 (2008), Dr Medina posits that we often
ignore how the brain works and so do we, researchers. If we were
to apply some of his 12 rules as to how researchers can generate
information, we could get more productive. As an example, there
are five rules that are particularly relevant for market research: 1)
‘exercise boosts brain power’ (rule #1); 2) ‘we do not pay attention
to boring things’ (rule #4); 3) ‘stimulate more of the senses’ (rule
#9); 4) ‘vision trumps all other senses’ (rule #10) and ‘we are
powerful and natural explorers’ (rule #12). In doing so, researchers
play on the engagement and brand relation of participants.
Allow participants to do what they like, surprise them with
something special and check out their reaction.

Engaging with internal stakeholders - impact engagement
If we are completely honest, a lot of the research that is commissioned
does not have the necessary impact. Unfortunately, research has
commoditized as clients search for ‘more and cheaper’, not true
transformation or added value. Still, the core of market research
should be to bring the voice and ideas of consumers inside
organizations all the way up into the boardroom. Because of their
very nature, online research communities facilitate this, however
researchers need to work at creating internal engagement and changing
management. Market research studies are not only about formal
presentations, knowledge management and communication programs.
The informal ‘corridor talk’ is an equally powerful way to have
managers use and share intelligence. The most powerful way is when
research is a conversation starter and generates lively stories about
customers. This can be done in three stages.

1. Engage the internal audience via positive disruption. Create a friction in terms of
contrasting management knowledge with actual market situations via e.g. games and
quizzes with managers. Let executives participate in a consumer quiz to learn about
consumer findings. By answering questions about consumers, they receive social status
(e.g. a badge), reach different game levels and unlock extra information when
progressing - at least something worth talking about.
2. Inspire executives by allowing them to observe, facilitate and even join
the consumer conversations in the community. Allow executives to participate in
the community.
3. Activate managers to increase their usage of market research studies in their daily job by
means of using creative and inspiring sessions and organize internal news
streams and infotainment (e.g. via Twitter updates, newsletters, infographics, mood
boards).
By creating internal engagement, the executives’knowledge
will increase, they will converse about the study at the water cooler
and will continue to observe consumers beyond the mere report (De
Ruyck et al., 2011).

Three tips for running MROCs in Asia
In the past few years, we have run a lot of global and local communities in Asian
countries such as South Korea, Malaysia, China, Japan and India. These communities
were powered by global brands in Fast Moving Consumer Goods - Unilever, Heinz, AB Inbev and
Heineken - and brands active in the durables category - Philips, IKEA and Quinny. Based on
these cases, we have identified three tips for running successful communities in Asia.

By default, we conduct these studies in the local
language. Meta-research on our communities
has taught us that members participate best if
they can write in their own language. Taking part
in an English-speaking community for a non-
native speaker can be hard. It has a rather
negative influence on the intensity of
participation and the level of detail and nuance
when one is talking. That is why it is preferred
to conduct communities in the native
language of the participant. For a global
project to evaluate the IKEA catalogue, for
example, we conducted five local communities
in, among other countries, China. All
moderators for these local communities
were trained community managers and
part of our Global Community Moderator
Network.
Local communities by default
While being in local contact with participants through a
local moderator, you still grasp the advantages of
having a central/global project team and content
overview when ‘connecting the dots’ on a global level.
Figure 2. IKEA @home community

That being said, there can be good reasons to
opt for a global English-speaking
community: non-native executives of the
company who want to follow the discussion,
limited budgets or the fact that one is in search of
global consensus on a given subject rather than
an understanding of local differences. An
example of the latter is our global ‘Shape It’
community for ketchup giant Heinz. The goal of
this project was to come up with a new and
uniform design for the shape of the next
generation ketchup bottle. Participants in
more than 10 countries, a.o. China and Japan,
took part in the same community to reach global
consensus.
Figure 3. Heinz Shape It community
Local communities by default

When designing your community, it is important to
take into account the technological differences
within the Asian markets. For example, when
we look at Indonesia, the Internet population is
mostly mobile (est. 55%). In the scenario of mobile-
only communities, we need to work in a more task-
based framework and ask more questions that can
be answered in a short and convenient way. Wisely
rethinking the mix of research tools and
adapting them to the small screen is a must. In
order to facilitate the community members at best,
the technology needs to fit the daily routines of the
target group. For example, we launched a global
community for the stroller manufacturer Quinny. The
goal of the community was to immerse with 120
‘urban parents’ for three weeks and to explore their
daily routines when moving around in the city (one
of the Asian cities in the study was Kuala Lumpur).
Facilitate Asian consumers to participate
anytime, anywhere
In order to capture their experiences on the go, we
enabled the parents to share as much
contextual and personal information of their
environment as possible through a dual screen
mobile community application. ‘Dual screen’ refers
to the parallel usage of desktop and mobile
connection. The ‘dual screen’ community solution
enabled members to also perform ‘offline’ tasks,
such as sharing the parents’ hotspots of the city,
spotting new trends and sharing opportunities for
the brand, in the heat of the moment. This dual
application resulted in 2,900 posts, including 433
photos, generated by 60% of the participants, 22%
of whom actually used the mobile app. This result
shows that this solution has given us the richness
of an ethnographic study and the depth of
several consecutive focus groups.

Now that we know that mobile is important for collaborating with consumers in Asia, the next question
we need to tackle is how to use it. Based on in-depth analysis of the Quinny case study, we have
identified three learnings for approaching mobile communities (Willems et al, 2013):
1. Stimulate recurring visits by several
challenges a day. A mobile app increases
community engagement. Community analytics
show that mobile users login 2.3 times more
and view 1.4 more pages compared to the non-
mobile members. They make 65% more
contributions, meaning that they are more
engaged with the community. In order to keep
their attention, community managers need
to stimulate recurrent mobile visits and
offer relatively more challenges on a daily
basis compared to desktop-only usage.
anytime, anywhere

2. Design challenges requesting multi-media
feedback. The mobile application generates
more visual feedback. While mobile/dual users
contribute 1.65 more posts, they only use half
the number of words compared to desktop-only
users (47 vs. 87 words). One might expect that
the reason for the short wording is because of a
speedy contribution and a smaller screen. We
observed however that the wordings are
replaced by a different, more visual
contribution such as a photo or video (6.2
photos by mobile-dual users vs. 2.6 photos by
desktop-only users). These results imply that
mobile communities need to include a lot more
yet shorter challenges requiring multi-media
feedback.
anytime, anywhere

3. Launch challenges targeted at contextual
and personal situations. The mobile
contributions have had a major impact on the
richness. While mobile generated only 41% of
the total number of photos, the relevancy of
those visuals is much higher; of all tagged
photos, the researcher allocated 52% of the tags
to photos generated by mobile. This shows that
the mobile component is of crucial
importance to fully understand the
contextual and personal situation of the
user group and to uncover richer insights.
anytime, anywhere

Next to technology, the native moderator
also helps us adapt the framework of
conversations. A different culture also means
different attitudes and values, leading to a
different way of reacting to questions, tasks and
challenges. When comparing the Asian
countries to the European and American ones,
we learned that the Asian community
members tend to perform better in
feedback exercises instead of in co-creative
tasks. They are less used to taking initiative
compared to European and American
participants.
Adapt the framework of conversations: more
group challenges generating feedback instead
of individual co-creative exercises
Also, these community members are more
comfortable talking about the group instead of
sharing a lot of details about themselves and
their lives. One of the main techniques that
fits this culture is what we call the ‘co-
researcher’ technique.

This technique was used in a recent study we
conducted for Philips, where we set up a three-
week insight-shaping community about
sleeping problems with 50 Chinese
consumers. To account for the sensitivity of this
medical topic, we invited 10 of our participants
as co-researchers to deepen our research
conclusions and help identify the underlying
values. After our analyses of the community
outtakes, these participants were presented our
findings and asked to challenge them. In
performing the task of co-analyses, these
participants were asked to explain our initial
conclusions from the Chinese cultural
perspective, to illustrate our findings with their
own personal examples and also to go beyond
our first impressions. By means of qualitative
coding of co-researcher discussions, we found
that in 14% of the co-researchers’ posts, the
conclusions were challenged (nuanced or
rejected). This means that every one out of
seven posts includes new information that
helps fine-tune our conclusion. For example,
the meaning and importance of well-being was
challenged by our co-researchers. Where our
conclusion initially was that Chinese consumers
value well-being, it’s more about being healthy in
order to work hard, earn more money and
ultimately improve life status. Working this way
with co-researchers created truly unique insights
that were key for Philips to find the right
positioning in the Chinese market. We, as
researchers and marketers, would never have
uncovered these insights from an online
distance (Schillewaert et al, 2012).

The case of Philips shows how co-researchers
help us validate and improve our
hypotheses from a cultural perspective. Next
to helping us understand the Asian culture, co-
researchers also help us compare the Asian
cultures to the West and capture the global
overview in a multi-country study. We recently
ran an MROC study in 18 different countries,
three of which were in Asia, for three weeks, for a
multi-national Fast Moving Consumer Goods
company. Referring to our first tip in this article,
all 18 countries had their own community
“Chinese just want to earn money to Improve living
standards. Health is absolutely of their concern, but
the well-being is not, because they are not aware of
that.” - By Cuihua, co-researcher of the Sleep
Well community
platform and local native moderators,
allowing all participants to express themselves
in their local language. After three weeks, we
opened up an extra discussion room and invited all
members who could express themselves in English.
In this room, we asked the members to become co-
researchers and challenge the conclusions on
themes that were thought to unite all countries. Five
cross-country findings were launched in the global
room. Three of these statements were confirmed on
a global level whereas the other two were countered
and therefore need to be adapted on a local level. In
this context, co-researchers can help the
researcher to compare Asia with other parts
of the world and find the global overview
more rapidly and more easily.

The future is now
While a research community method is already mainstream in the West, the method is still in its
infancy in the East. The interest in this flexible way of working however is increasing rapidly. The
fast adoption rates of smartphones, the increase of Wi-Fi and the improved access to local Internet
cafés enable consumers to participate in online and mobile-enabled communities. The time is
now to start collaborating structurally with your consumers. Let’s explore this new
method and discover fresh insights!

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De Ruyck, T., Knoops, S., Schillewaert, N., Coenen, G. and S. Rodrigues (2011), Engage,
Inspire, Act, ESOMAR Congress, Amsterdam.
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Crowdsourcing in Online Research Communities, CASRO Journal, pp. 5 - 9,
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hard-to-get-creating-positive-feedback-loops-throughengagement- in-online-research-
communities/
Van Belleghem, S., De Ruyck, T. & Thijs, D. (2012) Social Media Around The World.
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Consulting Publication.
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World. How Quinny leveraged Universal Insights for global branding and innovation.
InSites Consulting Publication.

Tom De Ruyck
Managing Partner &
Head of Consumer Consulting Boards
InSites Consulting
Anouk Willems
Research Innovation Manager
InSites Consulting
Erica Van Lieven
Founder & Managing Director
Direction First, Australia

www.insites-consulting.com
Thank you!
@InSites
marketing@insites-consulting.com
www.facebook.com/insitesconsulting
www.slideshare.net/InSitesConsulting

Running Research Communities in Asian markets

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