Market Research in Asia Chairman Tony Cowling on MR in Asia, and on the future of research The Asian MR market is growing by 10 to 11% a year and is ‘the hottest market worldwide for the market research industry’, according to Tony Cowling, Chairman of TNS. Cowling was speaking at the company’s rollout of its 6thdimension access panel to China and Japan, on September 27th - see DRNO, TNS Launches Panel in China as Asia Hots Up. Cowling explained that, while the business is growing 5% a year on average worldwide, growth in Asia is about 11%. Australia has the largest MR sector in the region, but this is growing only 4 to 5% a year, compared with 20% growth in China and 15% growth in India. He predicts that the ‘market research industry regionally will grow twice as fast as the overall economy,' driven both by the establishment of US and European companies in Asia - particularly in China - and by local companies’ increased use of MR. TNS total billings reached £950m last year, of which 12% was from Asia. TNS ‘6thdimension’ online panels are available in Australia, China, Hong Kong, Japan (scheduled for late 2005), Korea, New Zealand, Singapore and Taiwan. Cowling also spoke on the future of the industry at the 2005 Brighton conference of the BMRA (British Market Research Association), entitled Research Directions: A Fork in the Road? The Conference included an Industry Leaders’ Summit in which six senior speakers provided their personal visions and predictions for the next five years. See DRNO November 15 2005, Industry Leaders Predict MR’s Future. At the Summit, Cowling presented six ways in which the UK MR industry is changing, and six external trends that will also affect how it looks in five years’ time. He pointed out that, while the UK continues to be one of the world’s biggest MR spenders, it faces considerable threats: namely, it has one of the slowest growth rates, and is the third most expensive country for research. He described the six internal market forces as follows. The growing dominance of continuous, syndicated services, such as retail audits, media measurement, and ad spend studies, which now account for around 30 to 40% of MR business, and are dominated by the top six global companies. Having developed worldwide coverage of the key sectors, big companies are now building specialist sector knowledge in each country. Global companies are winning more and more multi-country projects. Research agencies are focusing on building relationships with the big research spenders. These big-spending clients are moving away from ad hoc research to continuous tracking studies, which feed into the measurement of their key performance indicators. There is an increase in packaged and branded research solutions. Summarising the key external trends, Cowling said: ‘You have to be in Asia, be outsourcing, and be using the Internet if you want to be in the future of MR.’ Cowling also pointed to the growth of company databases (such as information from loyalty cards), which can provide factual information that would previously have been acquired by MR, and which will impact on the role of the MR firm. In addition, he predicted a rise in the importance of modelling, forecasting and insight – linked to the rise in trend data from tracking studies. Finally, he stated that data delivery and integration need rethinking in order to provide large volumes of data to clients in a meaningful way.