Nickeluli

One big part of my work is research, since I always need to know how much review sites, and manufacturer that are represented on a market before we enter it. Much of this research (95%) is done by online market researchers. I always try to find local people living in the country, it’s always easier because they often know of these sites before we start the research.

I found it to be very important that the researcher have an interest in the area that they are doing the research. Two weeks ago I gave the exact same project to two researchers, just to see the difference. The result got me to question all my previous research projects. I wanted them to find me as many good review sites as possible in a big Asian country, not China. I told them I didn’t want forum, blogs or any spam sites (MFA).

Person1, lives in US but have language knowledge of the specific country and have a strong interest in all sorts of gadgets, came back with a list of more then 100 review sites.

Person2, lives in India and have worked with online research for four years and and have language knowledge of the specific country, came back with a list of 15 sites and told me there was not possible to find any more sites. And he had been working for a really long time.

I can also tell you that the cost of the research had big difference, person1 cost 150$, person2 cost me 50$. One of the reasons for person1 cost me more is that he’s located in US, but that was something I knew from the start. I just wanted to compare a online researcher from India with a research from US.

When I told person2, that I already had found more then 100 review sites in the country he wanted to try again, and a few days later he sent me a list with all the 100 first sites he had found in Google, mostly crap sites. It was e-commerce sites (without reviews), forum, blogs and other sites that I had no use of at all. I told him to seek work in another work segment. I told him that he had made a bad and sloppy research. Then he told me that I was a very bad buyer that didn’t understood the quality of my work, and then he told me that Americans where much better buyers and never distrusted his research.

At the moment I have 10 projects for market research running in countries all over the world, and I’ve stopped using the cheapest one. On all these projects there where a lot of Indian firms and freelancers bidding on them. But as always I raise a warning for these firms and people, make sure they really have the language skills that are needed and ask them for some kind of examples of research in the specific country.

Good luck with all your online research