As business and strategic planning continues to become borderless, organizations are looking to understand the potential for new customers and new offerings outside of their original locations.
No matter how new or how mature your company and marketing efforts are, multi-country research can be relevant to your role. At Drive Research, our experienced researchers have the knowledge, tools, and partner network required to conduct your research regardless of location or method.
What Is Multi-Country Market Research?
Multi-country research involves conducting primary research in more than one country, and typically more than one language.
Often referred to as global research, multi-country research involves the same basic requirements and capabilities to execute, but limits the number of languages and geographies where the research takes place.
Global research tends to require that all languages and cultural controls be accounted for as part of the project, which leads to much more complex planning and execution.
Why Multi-Country Market Research Matters
It’s critical to conduct multi-country research if your organization conducts business or is planning to expand business into another country.
Without understanding how different audiences feel, think and act, truly understanding the research findings can be a challenge.
Developing a market research plan to cover different areas around the globe will help identify where generalized strategies and tactics work across multiple countries.
Furthermore, this also highlights where tailored, different planning needs to be accounted for. Ultimately, the goal for multi-country research is to ensure businesses can create data-driven strategies based on their desired geographic information.
Things to Consider When Conducting Multi-Country Market Research
While research follows a systematic approach, there are a number of things to consider and control for when looking for a proper multi-country research partner.
Cultural Knowledge
Being aware of basic cultural differences between countries can be important to understand as you consider conducting multi-country projects.
For example, in some cultures we see that people tend to give overly positive feedback, while in other cultures feedback can be more critical by default. Understanding those differences, and where they occur, can lead a researcher to create country-specific strategies.
Techniques like applying different question styles and answer choices, or analyzing the results with a weighing scheme, are examples of what an experienced researcher may leverage to account for capturing the perspective of different cultures on similar research objectives.
Language Translation
Translating a research document’s questions and answers are an essential part of a multi-country survey study. For qualitative research, having a multilingual and localized moderator is a must.
Putting research documents through AI or machine translation can be an acceptable start. That said, ensuring your research includes human translations and localized resources are required to avoid basic mistakes that can change the meaning or credibility of the research.
Human translation also accounts for nuance, tone, and accuracy of what’s being asked.
Market Sizes
Understanding target market sizes or population density is a key factor in designing multi-country research.
Knowing where population centers are in various geographic areas can help point to where research is possible, and understanding how a geographic market is defined can inform how large of a sample size you need to generate reliable or representative results.
A reliable third-party research firm will project measures like margin of error and confidence intervals to market sizes, revealing how many responses the research may require.
Check out more detail on our margin of error tool here.
In our experience, looking at economic indicators can provide a sense of how healthy a particular region is in terms of revenue opportunity, buyer behaviors, and growth potential.
It’s important to consider things like GDP, employment rates, consumer confidence and spending trends so that your research is designed for results within the context of where it’s being conducted.
If you’re not able to inform your research with economic indicators for a particular country, Drive Research can help you locate or create those metrics.
Best Practices For Multi-Country Market Research Projects
Like all phases and methods of research, no two multi-country research projects are alike. Below, we’ve included the general guidelines to keep in mind as you explore your own market research partners.
Have Surveys Differ By Language and Culture
The reality is that most research can be conducted and administered in the English language, even in countries where English is a secondary language.
It’s important to offer the respondent the choice of which language they’d prefer to participate in, whether it’s survey research, long form in-depth interviews, or focus groups. Even in countries where English is the primary spoken language, there can be stylistic differences and cultural norms to be aware of in terms of what can and should be asked, as well as things to avoid.
Make Enough Time for Project Design
While working on multi-country research, it’s important to plan for a longer timeline. In fact, it’s not uncommon for a multi-country project to take twice as long as a single-country project.
Accounting for translations and localizations on the front end of a project are expected, but translations of responses and allowing time to coordinate research findings and their implications are likely to take additional time.
Additionally, there are often multiple partners that a research firm must utilize and coordinate with in order to finalize the design and delivery of an effective and reliable study.
Collect & Organize Data Properly
Online survey data, for the most part, can and should be collected using a single platform - even when the study is being executed in multiple languages and countries.
It’s common for results to be analyzed using the same platform, while some researchers may elect to use different software packages to analyze survey data depending on their analysis goals. For instance, qualitative research data, or conversational data, is mostly captured in the form of transcripts.
This data can be disjointed and exist in silos depending on how many moderators were needed, where the conversations took place, and what platforms or devices were used to record.
At Drive Research, we’re experienced in managing the many aspects of multi-country data, no matter the method or format, and have a full solution to partner on your next need.
Challenges of Multi-Country Market Research
While there are many positives of investing in multi-country research, there are a few challenges to note.
Often, these challenges range from businesses not knowing where to begin, to needing a specialty partner to capture study participation in a hard-to-reach location. Research operations including localizations and timelines can also be difficult to manage and plan for.
Thankfully, a firm like Drive Research can provide simple, effective solutions for each of these issues listed above.
Contact Our Global Market Research Company Today
At Drive Research, our team will partner with yours to create a tailored multi-country market research project based on your specific needs. Boasting 80+ years of combined experience in the field, we’ll work with you to ensure you receive the best quality data.
To learn more about our market research services, get in touch with us today.
- Message us on our website
- Email us at [email protected]
- Call us at 888-725-DATA
- Text us at 315-303-2040
Zach Adams
Zach is the Vice President of Strategy at Drive Research. He leverages his background to advise clients on topics including customer insight, competitive intelligence, branding, positioning, messaging, creative strategy, and organizational leadership.
Learn more about Zach, here.
