As a young Malaysian who markets to Malaysian youths for a living, I still come face to face with these myths. I meet marketers who believe them, bosses who preach them. Many of us even let it hold us back from making the right marketing decisions without us knowing it.
I used to believe some of them, too. Fortunately, my journey in building The Youth Intelligence (TYI) and providing Malaysia’s first specialised youth research panel and other youth community marketing platforms, gave me plenty of hard knocks and valuable lessons.
In this article, I will zoom in on 3 specific market research myths, and why it may hold you back from truly understanding your desired youth market segment and making the right marketing decisions.
MYTH#1 – Market research costs too much and takes too long.
In some cases, it can really be true. But it doesn’t have to be this way if you’re targeting the youth segment – even if you’re a small business.
To illustrate why, let’s travel back to last year, when YouthMalaysia did a RM80,000 on-ground survey on 5,000 young Malaysians across 14 universities and colleges across Malaysia, including Universiti Malaysia Sabah (UMS) and Universiti Malaysia Sarawak (UNIMAS).
Data collection took 3 months, data entry and analysis took another two. The results were indeed valuable to the organisation that commissioned it, but the lesson to YouthMalaysia was even more valuable. Firstly, all the students surveyed had an email address! They went online at least once a week, even though they didn’t have access to a PC at home! This includes students in the rural colleges as they used the university’s email and computer labs. Perhaps these youths could’ve been reached via the Internet…
Secondly, what if the survey was conducted with the Internet in the first place? How much more money would be saved? Would results come in sooner?
It became clear that market research needn’t take so long, or cost so much, if online research panels were used.
If this was so obvious, why was YouthMalaysia commissioned to do an on-ground survey, as opposed to an online survey in the first place?
In this case, the organisation that commissioned the YouthMalaysia survey didn’t believe online surveys would reach out to a representative sample of all college/ university youths. And this leads us to the next myth.
MYTH#2 – Online research panels do not accurately represent Malaysian youths
Meet Rom. He’s the one staring at you on the left. Rom’s street gang roams Bukit Bintang in the wee hours of the night. All his gang members hail from the same island off Sabah, coming to KL as teenagers in search of work and destiny. Our paths should never have crossed, but it did.
This happened early February last year, 3am on a cold night right outside Lot 10. Usually I would be in bed, but that night, I was with two friends and our guitars, busking on the streets, just to see what it felt like. We were completely unprepared for what was about to happen.
Rom and his gang emerged from the alleys and walked towards us. His gang stared us down at first. We smiled at them and continued playing. Out of suspicious stares, Rom broke into a faint smile, and clapped his hands along to our tunes. Soon the entire group was clapping and singing along, with the streets to ourselves. Being more of a marketer than a musician, I put down my guitar to tap into their minds instead. I learned that:
- None of them finished high school and most worked at mamaks or did odd jobs during the day.
- Walking around the streets at night is their favourite pastime.
- All of them frequent cyber cafés, using email to stay in touch with family and friends back home, who also access the Net via cyber cafés.
- All of them have MySpace profiles, yet only half own mobile phones.
This got me thinking. Perhaps there are more young Malaysians from all walks of life on the Internet than we think? Maybe Starbucks-sipping urbanites weren’t the only young Malaysians online, and if Rom and his island friends back home could find their way online, perhaps online panels could find their way to them too. Another danger with believing that Myth #2 is that you may close the door to accurate, valuable insights. Why? Simply put, a Chinese-speaking urban Malaysian Chinese and an urban upper class Malay may have so little in common! In many cases, you want to hear what each youth segment has to say, not generalise them as one identity. Instead of surveying ‘Malaysian youths’, perhaps you want the same survey to get answers from niche youth panels such as “East Malaysians” and “Rural Malays”, and “Chinese speaking Chinese” to unlock deeper insights. But where would you go for such insights?
MYTH#3 – Affordable research on youths is not available in Malaysia
Over coffee in Subang Jaya, the project director of YouthMalaysia, Joel Neoh was sharing key lessons from the five-month YouthMalaysia survey. He concluded he would NEVER do on-ground surveys on youths again. Results from his on-ground survey suggested that online research panels would work well with the youth market. But who provides such a service in Malaysia? We found a few. But we felt embarrassed to approach them with our tight marketing budgets.
Considering Joel and I already had some years of youth marketing and youth community building experience under our belts, and we were still ‘young’ (we’re both under 25), we thought we could use the Internet to make specialised youth research affordable for organisations of any size. Launching the first Malaysian youth online research panel took a few months, but we’re proud that today, organisations of every size, from small businesses to the likes of Astro, the Ministry of Youth and Sport, and TM, have taken advantage of our custom-built panels, affordable rates and quick turnaround time of five days or less to conduct valuable research on young Malaysians. A recent research we conducted on 1,071 young Malaysians showed that 61.1% of youths surveyed agreed to the statement: “I find it more comfortable to say what I want to say through SMS and emails”. This is good news for marketers who are willing to listening to them. The old perception of long wait time, high costs, and scepticism towards online research no longer applies if you’re going for the Malaysian youth segment. Demand for online research in Malaysia is growing, just as it has in other countries.