In a nutshell

If you want to know how the markets of Asia will react to your retail product, be it coffee or coconut oil, go ask Singapore-based InsightAsia. They are a household name in market research and market survey, with leadership positions in about 10 countries in the eastern hemisphere.

Challenges, not problems

InsightAsia wanted to deliver new levels of insight to their consumer giant clients, hot off the street. They wanted to tap a representative user base for each product, carefully curated, and then get their feedback of the use of the product while the product was being used. No more filling questionnaires at the end of the week — do it right then and there.

This was to be done through an app. Each user in the group would be told which product she was assigned, and would see a set of questions to answer on the app, preferably as soon as each experience happened. Questions would of course be different for different products, and could also be pushed dynamically to users, in real time. The market survey coordinating team, sitting in the InsightAsia office, would monitor responses coming from the participants, create new questions on the fly based on the responses they were receiving, push them out, get responses in minutes or hours, and thus steer the course of the survey.

This was a new project, a new service offering of InsightAsia. They called it 360Research.

Solutions, not ideas

We built this app for them. Well, two apps actually: native iOS and native Android. We also built the cloud-based back-end system, with sophisticated dashboards, MIS reports, static and dynamic question support. There was also a dashboard for the client, typically the marketing department of FMCG giants, to watch the market survey as it proceeded and responses flowed in.

We provided support for multiple languages, so that the questionnaire could be defined in different languages, and the version which the survey participant set as his default language on his phone would decide which version of the questionnaire he received.

We steered the project through the various fine-tuning stages and tweaks needed whenever any native mobile app needs to run flawlessly on various phones with various OS versions and screen sizes. We supported the client while Apple released a major version upgrade of their iOS — which, in real world terms, means that 96% of your iPhone users move to a new, unknown, semi-incompatible version of iOS in 5 days flat, worldwide, and chaos reigns when various apps break at various places.

Now that’s value

Our product was rolled out to at least three countries within weeks of our first release, and over several months, provided the foundation for a new way to handle market surveys in the consumer space.

360Research helped InsightAsia gain a leadership position in terms of technology enabled market insights in the Asian markets.