A multi-country research program is comparable when every market answers the same question in the sense that matters for the decision. Identical wording, identical samples and identical reports don’t guarantee that, and they can get in the way of it.
The comparison is settled before fieldwork, when the central team agrees what it will compare once the results are in, and what each market is free to ask on its own terms.
The same words can ask different questions
Translation is the first place this shows. For its international surveys, Pew Research Center says it “strives for questions that are comparable at the level of meaning, not simply literal translations of the original English versions.”
The same is true beyond the questionnaire. A price point, a pack size or an occasion such as a night in can mean something different from one market to the next. A concept board shown unchanged everywhere can be judged against different things in each place, so a gap between two markets may say more about the stimulus than about the people.
Comparable is a decision, made first
What every market has to share depends on what the central team will compare. If the decision is which market to enter first, each needs the same measures of size and readiness. If it is which idea to lead with, each needs to judge the ideas on the same terms, while the reasons people give can differ as much as they like.
A spirits company building its ready-to-drink strategy needed one base of evidence across six markets, so one survey design ran in all of them, with occasions mapped to what a drink has to do on each. A global report set out what the markets share and where they differ, and a closer look at one priority market gave its team more depth. The work is described in Grounding a spirits company’s ready-to-drink strategy in evidence.
Local depth without losing the comparison
Shared questions needn’t be shallow ones. A market that matters more to the plan can go deeper, and a local team can add questions of its own, as long as the core every market answers stays intact.
Qualitative work makes the point clearly, because comparison there rests on asking about the same thing more than on asking in the same words. A spirits brand developing new flavors took every direction to drinkers in three markets with the same three questions: what works, what stands in the way and what would have to change. Asked the same way everywhere, those questions let each direction be compared on equal terms, as Developing flavor ideas that travel across markets describes.
That depends on moderators who know their markets. A moderator who knows a market hears what a translated guide can’t ask directly, which is why our qualitative work in other markets is run with preferred local moderators we have worked with for many years.
What it means for the brief
The most useful early conversation is about two lists: the comparisons the central team will make once the results are in, and the decisions each local team owns. The first list sets what every market shares. The second sets what each market can do its own way.
A program built from those two lists can serve the global plan and each local plan at once, which is the question our international research starts from.