Clever market research app makes brand surveys fun and rewarding

What made Sony lose relevance in Southeast Asia, while Samsung’s star rose?

According to Kengo Kurokawa, a Japanese marketer-turned-entrepreneur living in Vietnam, the difference was how much effort the two firms put into market research. “Sony failed to understand the Southeast Asian consumer,” he says.

Kengo should know because he spent 10 years of his career in the marketing departments of Sony and Japanese clothing retailer Uniqlo. His job took him all over the world. For a few years, he lived in Singapore. He developed an interest in the fast-growing markets of Southeast Asia.

Kengo concluded that Japanese companies were doing something wrong with their approach to the region. They hired costly firms to lead market research surveys, but the results were not satisfactory and took too long to produce.

Kengo Kurokawa

“There was a high margin of error because they would do a lot manually. Errors happen when you copy and paste into Excel sheets row by row,” he scoffs.

Kengo’s business idea was born: a product that would let Japanese firms survey current values and tastes of Southeast Asia’s consumers, at a cheaper price. As a Japanese with extensive marketing experience in the region, he thought he was the right person to do it. And he knew his solution would have to involve smartphones, because that’s the best way to get an accurate picture of people’s lives.

A set of business decisions

Once he knew he wanted to build an app-based solution to market research, Kengo started conceptualizing his idea methodically. The first decision: where to start?

Four factors convinced him to choose Vietnam to build and test the product. First, he explains, is the availability of tech talent in Vietnam. “The country is known as a destination for outsourcing engineering work,” he says. Second, it has a high rate of smartphone adoption, and third, a strong mobile network. The fourth reason was the size of the two major cities, Ho Chi Minh and Hanoi. “Large enough, but compact,” Kengo says. ”Here we can come up with a product, launch it, if something is wrong, we can change it, and once it works, we can take it elsewhere.”

Gamifying market research

It took three months to build a prototype with a team of Vietnamese engineers, and then another three to iron out the crinkles .

The result was Q&Me, a mobile app anyone can download to participate in surveys, with a gamification twist. Users are rewarded, they get US$0.10 per completed survey. They can redeem this money the form of phone top-up points. As an extra incentive, there are occasional prizes based on lucky draws. Completing one survey takes about 10 minutes.

To keep the user base interested in the app, Q&Me mixes brand surveys with their own, and even accepts community-generated ones. These fun surveys are the reason people keep coming back, Kengo says. They could be asking about favorite celebrities, food preferences, or leisure activities. Users connect to the app via Facebook, so the startup already knows base data like name, location, and age. It also has the advantage that people can share the surveys they enjoyed with their friends.

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