The chances are that when you’re reading this, I will be already winging my way out to Singapore to start my annual tour of Asian markets to coincide with ESOMAR’s Asia Pacific Conference, celebrating the 20th edition of the now annual event.
The first edition of the conference, Marketing in Asia, was held in 1996 in Hong Kong, a year before the United Kingdom transferred the colony to Chinese ownership. ESOMAR’s first event in the region felt like a snapshot of a continent in transition, accelerated by the rapid globalisation of the 80s and 90s. But looking back at the papers from that first event, which are available for all ESOMAR members in MyESOMAR, Kay Broadbent, in her paper that explores the changing face of the market in Asia Pacific and its impact on the research industry, suggests that the changes started 50 years previously. In Kay’s point of view, some regions of Asia Pacific had moved through various stages of marketing evolution at three times the rate at which European markets developed, steaming through 150 years’ worth of business evolution in just 50 years. When ESOMAR first came to Asia Pacific in 1996, the region was already well past being an emerging market.
That’s not to say that there hasn’t been incredible progress and transformation since that first event 23 years ago. Online data collection, smartphone penetration and wireless technology, and automation have changed the market research industry significantly, while a recent report in Entrepreneur magazine suggests that Artificial Intelligence will double innovation spread in APAC within the next two years.
At every ESOMAR event we look to celebrate impact, because without action there is no insight. However, with this year’s Asia Pacific conference it has a deeper meaning for ESOMAR – this year we look forward to celebrating our small part in over 20 years of exchanging knowledge and innovation with industry peers from across the world. And we look forward to celebrating how much the Asia Pacific region has been at the forefront of these profound global changes.
While I was perusing ESOMAR’s past Asia Pacific papers I discovered Colin Maitland and Mark Ahn’s paper “Forecasting Without Data, a Fool’s Dream?” which describes the challenge of forecasting in China. “With such a vast country finding data is always a problem. There is a massive amount of data available. Indeed, the problem is not a shortage of data, it is an excess of it that makes finding it a problem. The quantity of data grows logarithmically with the size of the country”. This proto-big data challenge, an almost 25 year old echo of more recent data issues, illustrates a key reason why this sector is so important for the broader data industry. Innovation is driven by necessity and those necessities are wildly different depending on the region. It’s these differences that strengthen the data industry globally.
This year we will be celebrating the impact the region has had on the global industry as well as in macro business issues. But we will also be celebrating technological innovations in the region; how artificial intelligence is optimizing media ROI and brand engagement, as well as the use of voice in qualitative research methodologies. And as always, we will look to celebrate humanity; how research is contributing to the promotion of gender equality in Japan, the improvement of digital literacy of women in rural India and reducing the amount of unrequested goods sent during humanitarian crisis.
So, if you have yet to book your ticket for Asia Pacific 2019, I strongly recommend you do so, it truly is one of the most important global events in the calendar. For those who have already got your ticket, I look forward to welcoming you to Macau, just across the Peral River Delta from Hong Kong and the location of our very first Asia Pacific conference.
