You Are Here: Home > Articles > Branding, Advertising, Marketing & Sales > Article

How To Get Information About Chinese Market

by Limo

In order to get the right information, identifying the sources of information is a fundamental step to build a complete and comprehensive database for your further data analysis. Let’s look at some widely used sources of information in China.

News Report

Searching online news on Baidu (百度), the most powerful search engine in China, is a typical and common way to collect information. With the feature “advanced” which is a Baidu filter, you can type specific topics you would like to search for and rank it either by relevance, or by time, so that you can get a whole storyline of an event and also the sentiments from the public and media communicated on.

Industrial Information

In China, industrial reports are usually carried out by local government or consulting firms. Baidu Wenku (百度文库) aggregates a large amount of reports and is an open platform to share with netizens. However, industrial reports which are usually published on Baidu Wenku are outdated and cannot even be fully downloaded. They can be used as a reference to analyze the market over the past few years. Another way of collecting industrial information is to find relevant websites which are exclusively publishing news release or monitoring figure index of developing trend within this field.

State Statistics Bureau Of China

State Statistics Bureau’s website provides the most updated and official data released by Chinese government about agriculture, industry, real estate, individual income of Chinese, and other segments of industry. Data published by State Statistics Bureau are usually macroeconomic figures, but to some extent, they can be a reference for you to grasp a general idea on a market in China. The best part for this website is that it is convenient for you to sort out data monthly, quarterly, and yearly.

Insiders

Insiders within corporations from your competitors, or distribution channels are the most appropriate sources of information to get a proper idea of the market but it is hard to get! Market research companies are able to help you analyze and filter out possibly helpful respondents, to conduct interviews with them or execute some mystery shopping activities, and eventually to gather a fresh and useful idea, real data and feelings from sales channels or competitors.

Consumers

If you are intending to measure customer satisfaction or test a new product, opinions from general consumers are very valuable and worthy to collect by both quantitative research and qualitative research. As for quantitative research, the researcher is expecting that because of the number of questionnaires done, it will lead to an unbiased result that can be generalized to some larger population. On the other hand, qualitative research could help to ask broad and longer questions and collect word data from participants. The researcher looks for themes and describes the information in themes and patterns exclusive to that set of participants.

Limo is a Chinese consultant from Daxue Consulting that provides world-class quality market research service. Through gathering talents and elites from top universities in China and France, Daxue Consulting is able to offer a series of cost-effective marketing research services including focus groups, mystery shopping, and in-depth interviews as well.

Share this article: