“Even though Thailand is the largest market in Southeast Asia, followed by Singapore and Indonesia, its growth rate is the lowest,” Jerome Hervio, president of the Thailand Marketing Research Society, said yesterday. Hervio said Myanmar, Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam were among the fastest-growing in terms of investment on market research, while Indonesia, the Philippines, Singapore and Malaysia also continued to grow this year.

Speaking as managing director of Ipsos (Thailand), he said his clients were cautious with their market-research budgets as well as other expenses related to advertising.

However, he believes that the industry will pick up again next year with growth of about 1-2 per cent in accordance with the economy’s growth.

Throughout this year, the industry is expected to see intense competition because of the arrival of new players, particularly involving qualitative and digital-based research.

Hervio said digital-based research, particularly via mobile devices, would be the future of market research in the Kingdom, where more than 90 per cent of mobile-device users were accessing the Internet with them.

Limitations

However, the challenge is that implementing effective data collection from new media appears to have limitations. For example, long questionnaires do not appear to be suitable for online respondents. Therefore, a company should work with research specialists to design each question simply, but the question must lead to the right answer – truth and real insight.

Arpapat Boonrod, chief executive officer of Kantar Consumer Insights Thailand, told The Nation that this country was a mobile-centric society, so brands as well as market-research firms must explore any possibilities to use mobile platforms to get consumer data and insight.

Hervio agreed that online research was playing a key role in the market.

From what he has witnessed, the online research conducted by brands and market-research firms on average took up less than 5 per cent of their total budgets, but within the next two years, this |proportion could reach 60 per cent.

Of Ipsos’ clients, 70 per cent are in fast-moving consumer goods (FMCGs) while the rest are in banking and financial services, insurance, retail and automotive businesses.

“Banks, insurance, retailers and automotive companies tend to explore opportunities to use more digital-based research than FMCGs,” he said.