Forging new paths in old lands

Editor’s note: Ahmed Nassef is vice president and general manager of Maktoob.com, an Arab Web portal. Tamara Deprez is director of Dubai-based Maktoob Research.

These days, it is practically impossible to pick up a major American newspaper without reading about Dubai . Whether it is the construction of the world’s tallest building (which will also include the world’s first Armani super-luxury hotel), the world’s biggest shopping mall or the world’s biggest amusement park (housing the biggest Universal Studios), Dubai’s incredible growth has made it a center of commercial attention and has brought the larger Middle East market into focus for many of the world’s businesses.

However, reaching Arab consumers is not always easy, and trying to reach them online presents its own special set of challenges. While Dubai’s high Internet penetration rates (over 60 percent) should present fertile ground for online research, you’ll be hard pressed to find much of it being conducted, even by local branches of some of the international research firms. And beyond Dubai, the rest of the Middle East offers additional obstacles for online researchers as well.

For one, although the region’s population of over 250 million people shares a common language and culture, they are spread out over 22 countries from Morocco to the Arabian Gulf, with often widely varying dialects, degrees of social and political openness, cultural mores and government regulations.

Even in a high-tech hub like Dubai, consumer databases are hard to come by. Unlike the United States and Europe, where a long tradition of catalog and database marketing made it easier to shift to online approaches, the astonishingly fast economic growth in the region has meant that many businesses have had to formulate their marketing strategies without having the proper database infrastructure to support their marketing and market research needs. Although customer relationship management continues to be a hot topic in this part of the world, it is still a long way from implementation in most businesses here.

This is why, until today in both Dubai and the rest of the Middle East and North Africa, most marketing research activities take place through the traditional means of mall intercepts, face-to-face and telephone interviews (and even the latter is not all that common).

Since the practicalities and costs of harvesting a large enough proprietary online consumer database to allows for refined targeting of consumer segments are prohibitive for most research firms, even for those that already have the software and infrastructure to conduct online research, it winds up being a lot easier (and cheaper) to rely on the tried-and-true status quo.

The unavailability, until recently, of online consumer samples has also been the main obstacle for many of the large global online agencies to offer their services in the Middle East, which has meant that many U.S. and Europe-based clients have had to skip the region altogether in their fieldwork plans.

Haven’t felt pressure

To this point, many of the local research firms haven’t felt much pressure to go online since many of their local clients are still working with the impression that the Internet cannot offer a representative sample of all consumer segments in the region.

While this may have been true four or five years ago, when Internet penetration was barely measurable in the Arab world, the situation is far different today. A variety of factors - from government sponsored financing of personal computers in the homes and the availability in some countries of “free” Internet through dial-up connections, to the proliferation of Internet cafes even in provincial towns and the increase in broadband access in large cities - have contributed to skyrocketing numbers of people from all walks of life going online.

In addition, especially in more traditional societies, the Internet has become one of the avenues for open, unfettered communication and access to information. For many Saudi women, for example, the Internet provides a chance to virtually go places and socialize in a way that would otherwise be practically impossible in the brick-and-mortar world.

For all these reasons, there are upwards of 30 million Arabs online today, and that number is slated to double in the coming two years.

The fact that we have reached good representative levels, even for lower-income groups that are less represented among Internet users, has been corroborated by our clients who have conducted parallel offline and online studies to test this very issue.

Mirror the skepticism

However, despite the large numbers, the objections we hear from marketers and researchers in the region - even ones who acknowledge the fact that there are sufficiently large numbers of the population online - mirror the skepticism that was often heard early on in the U.S. and Europe about the truthfulness of respondents online. Sure you may have a huge consumer sample, a typical skeptic would counter, but how can I be sure that someone who claims to be a young Moroccan woman really is one, or how can I really be certain that the Kuwaiti respondent ticking off a high income bracket to answer my property ownership study isn’t really a struggling Egyptian college student with time to kill?

For those of us who are true believers in online research in the Middle East, the best way to assuage these concerns is to implement strong data controls. In our case, we have built a highly segmented database over the past seven years of Arab consumers that includes information about gender, age, country of residence, profession and other demographic information. But of course, we can’t stop there to satisfy the truthfulness concerns. The data supplied by the consumer upon registration must always be confirmed by the data they supply on a live questionnaire. If there are discrepancies, their responses are thrown out.

But beyond the basic checks and filter controls that must be implemented, there are also issues unique to our region that make online research actually much more reliable in many cases than traditional methods. Many Arabs are often much less willing to share deeply personal information with interviewers. Questions about social attitudes, smoking habits or political views are often considered deeply private and not easily shared, and traditional fieldwork here often has to involve some prodding by the interviewer that can pose the danger of swaying responses. Further, reaching women in some areas, especially in the Arabian Gulf countries, presents a special challenge on its own for the traditional interview approach, which makes it exceedingly slow and expensive to conduct - an especially frustrating challenge for FMCG researchers for whom females represent the main target consumer market.

However, we have found that by going online, these obstacles largely disappear. We regularly receive high responses on the very same sensitive issues we mentioned above, and Arab women are more accessible online than via telephone or face-to-face interviews, since as we mentioned previously, the Internet presents them with an open space free of the usual social restrictions that are often placed on them in some contexts.

Improving the outlook

Besides the issue of accuracy, there are some other factors that are improving the outlook for online researchers in the Middle East.

As more and more multinational companies adopt online research as a core part of their overall research mix, more and more pressure builds on their local and regional branches here in the region to begin the process of incorporating online methods. We’ve already seen this process taking place in the online advertising sector, where local marketers have had to quickly educate themselves in online marketing techniques in order to integrate global online campaigns, and the same process is happening for online research as well.

Another development that is encouraging more researchers to go online is the fast adoption of social networking and Web 2.0 tools in the Arab world. Not only are international sites like Blogger, YouTube, and Facebook commonly used, but localized versions of these sites are popular, offering Arab users a way to connect with virtual affinity groups and friends networks using an Arabic-language interface and within a culturally acceptable environment (some countries in the region have banned some of the international sites due to inappropriate content).

The popularity of these services makes it possible to conduct the same advanced type of online qualitative studies that are occurring worldwide. Researchers can find consumers who are already engaged in a relevant discussion to join online qualitative panels on related topics, and again we have found a much higher level of openness and willingness to discuss sensitive issues within this environment.

All of these developments, combined with the universal advantages of online research - flexibility, speed and lower costs - are quickly making the online option much more palatable to regional decision-makers.