International

We do our work all over the world. Two-thirds of our business is international in nature, ranging from single country overseas studies to eight-country studies on four continents.

We conduct such work in a variety of ways. Often we visit all the countries involved, to brief the local researcher face-to-face and to view the initial fieldwork. This gives the local researcher a better feeling for the project and it allows us to ensure that everything runs to our satisfaction, as well as permitting us to develop hypotheses which can be developed in other markets. Sometimes we operate remotely (if there are for example severe time constraints or we believe we know a market pretty well or the local researcher is experienced on the brand), whereby we brief by phone /Webex and don’t watch the fieldwork. On other projects we operate a mix of both approaches, and we strive always to make best use of technology, for example the use of FocusVision.

International work is logistically demanding and complex. We pioneered the role of Project Managers within qualitative research: they spend their lives organising recruitment, sorting out costs, arranging flights/ accommodation, and running researchers’ diaries. They are totally office-based, so one of their most important roles is as an additional contact point for clients. 

To help them, we have a proprietary software tool called Infosystem. This is just one example of our belief in the virtues of being process-driven in order to let researchers spend more time cogitating, analysing and hypothesising.