Tamara Deprez Tamara Deprez started up Maktoob Research in May 2006 and succeeded in making it a research product for professionals in the marketing and research industry in the Middle East, Europe and the US within a year. Read the full biography here. Marouane Sanhaji Marouane is responsible for launching one of the first fully managed panels in the Middle East for Y! Maktoob Research and has been able to maintain high quality data collection from the online surveys conducted in the UAE and KSA. Read the full biography here.

Online Research in the Middle East and North Africa

Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose

By Tamara Deprez and Marouane Sanhaji - 16th December, 2010

Many of you will routinely use online panels every day. Especially in the US and Europe, they have become the sample source of choice. This is because they are faster and more cost effective than other methodologies. CATI is suffering from dropping response rates due to its intrusion and interruption aspects and face-to-face is struggling with increasing cost and slow turnaround time.

However let me tell you of the challenges online panels present us with at Yahoo Maktoob Research. The United Arab Emirates (UAE), one of our main markets, has one of the highest Internet penetrations in the region, but local research buyers are still not fully confident about the methodology. There are many reasons for that.

Most regional researchers do not want to get out of their comfort zone. Research companies in the UAE are so used to their off-line methodologies, mainly face-to-face research, and are too reluctant to try something new that they do not feel they have a full understanding of. The lack of training definitely plays a big part in this.

Perhaps the biggest factor is the cost of running face-to-face interviews in the UAE, which is much lower than in other parts of the world. Low paid labor is widely available, and the cost of switching to online can be quite high for some companies. The CPI in the UAE for face-to-face in a general population study does not exceed US$ 6 which is almost the same, if not less, than the CPI to run it online. This issue is very much applicable in many places in the world where cheap labor is widely available such as North Africa; parts of the Far East such as India and China; and Latin America.

If the issue were only market penetration it would be hard to see why clients are not more interested in online in the UAE. The representation of the Internet population compared to the general population plays a role. The Internet in the region started off with affluent and educated segments mainly. However, with decreasing computer prices and Internet connections, having access to an Internet connection has become affordable to practically all segments of the UAE population, and many other parts of the Middle East and North Africa. If we compare the UAE market with the Bulgarian market, in Bulgaria the Internet penetration is about 47.5% and the online research methodology has a whopping 43% market share. In the UAE the Internet penetration is 75.9% and online research methodology has less than 3% of the total research spend.

However with our currently available panels we do have another problem, which is that they do not represent the general population. Due to the lack of email databases and companies that offer recruitment services for panels, most panels in the UAE base their recruitment on a single source. This creates an issue mostly in terms of psychographic representation, since the demographic representation of the sample can be fixed by assigning quotas or by using weighting.

Quality of response is also an issue which stops some companies from adopting the online methodology. Duplicate responses, speedsters, straight liners, wrong demographic information, just to name a few, are quality issues that are coming up. However these are issues globally and many companies have come up with software and procedures which minimize these. There is no 100% fault free methodology. The Internet has its loopholes, but with the right quality control systems and regular updates, most of these issues can be tackled.

As the world and the UAE go more and more digital, more and more companies will start looking at ways to overcome these issues, adopt online as a methodology and catch up with the rest of the world. Changing the mindset will be the most difficult part. Looking past the issues and seeing the benefits of online panels is key for the development of the industry in the UAE. These same issues have been faced by other countries in the world that are running almost 100% of their research online, but have made the move due to an understanding that its benefits far exceed its shortfalls.

Tamara Deprez and Marouane Sanhaji

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