How to Start a Marketing Research and Consultancy Business in Dubai

How to Start a Marketing Research and Consultancy Business in Dubai

A research practice is paid for an answer and then judged on how much that answer surprised the person who paid for it. Confirm what a client already believed and the fee feels wasted, even though a confirmed assumption is frequently the more valuable result — he was about to commit money on a hunch and is now committing it on evidence. Contradict him and the method is examined line by line, sample size first, by somebody who has an interest in it being wrong.

Marketing Research & Consultancies, as the line reads in the activity catalogue, is therefore a business in which the quality of the work and the satisfaction of the buyer are only loosely related, and a practice has to be built to survive that rather than hope to avoid it. What it sells is a number and the method that produced it, and the method is the half that has to hold when a hostile reader goes through it. That is a different discipline from producing output or offering an opinion: the internal standards of the practice matter more here than its presentation, because the presentation is what gets believed and the standards are what get tested.

The fee is trivial next to the decision it is meant to de-risk

Start with what the buyer is actually weighing. A retailer is choosing between two sites. A manufacturer is deciding whether a product that sells in one market will sell in this one. A board is setting a price, entering a country, or deciding whether to keep a brand it acquired. The sums committed to those decisions are large, the cost of being wrong is larger, and a research fee alongside them is a rounding error. That asymmetry is the commercial case for the line, and it is the reason a research practice should never price against the hours it spent.

The constraint on price is not cost. It is how obvious the answer looks in advance. A client will pay well to settle a question his own people have been arguing about for a month, and badly for a question he thinks he could answer himself over coffee. Scoping is therefore mostly an exercise in establishing that the question is genuinely open, and a practice that cannot do that in the first meeting will spend its life quoting against whoever is cheapest.

The cost base is fieldwork, and in this market fieldwork is the hard part rather than the routine part. The population is substantially expatriate, spread across many nationalities and first languages, and a sample that is representative of the country has to be built deliberately rather than gathered conveniently. People are transient, so a panel decays faster than it would elsewhere. Willingness to answer an unsolicited approach is low. And the places where people actually are — malls, residential communities, office parks, clinics — are privately controlled, so reaching them is a commercial negotiation before it is a methodological one. Questionnaires have to work in several languages, which means translating the meaning rather than the words, and a badly localised question produces data that looks clean and is worthless.

Two things follow for the shape of the business. The first is that the practice's real asset is its ability to reach people — a maintained panel, interviewers who stay, the access arrangements, and the incentives that keep respondents answering. That is a cost line a newcomer underestimates and a competitor cannot copy quickly. The second is that almost all the repeat revenue in this line comes from tracking work: the same questions, on a comparable sample, at intervals. Ad-hoc projects pay the bills and tracking studies build the business, because the second wave is worth more than the first and the fourth is almost impossible to take away.

CZ 302 — Marketing Research & Consultancies

The name carries two halves, and the second one is where both the margin and the boundary sit.

The research half covers designing the question, choosing and building the sample, collecting the data — face to face, by telephone, through an online panel, by observation, by mystery shopping — then analysing it and reporting it. The consultancy half covers advising the client what to do about what was found: which site, which price, which segment, whether to proceed.

Those two are not the same kind of claim and should not be presented as though they were. A finding is defensible: it was collected by a stated method from a stated sample, and a competent reader can test it. A recommendation is a judgement, and its weight depends on the adviser rather than on the data. Good reports keep them visibly apart, partly because it is honest and partly because the half a client disputes is almost always the recommendation, and a practice that has blurred the line finds its evidence being attacked along with its advice.

The boundary matters more where the subject is itself controlled. Measuring what people think about a medicine, a health service, a financial product or a school is research. Telling a client what to claim about one is somebody else's licensed work, and a general consultancy line does not reach into it. A practice can report the finding, name the constraint, and leave the recommendation to whoever holds the relevant licence — which is also the commercially stronger position, because it demonstrates that the practice knows where its own evidence stops.

Before any of that produces an invoice, several separate permissions and obligations have to be in place, and they are held by different parties.

What has to be settled before an interviewer approaches anybody

Access comes first, because it decides whether the job is deliverable at the price quoted. A mall, a gated community, an office park, a hospital waiting area and a university campus are each controlled by an operator who may say no, may charge, or may take weeks to answer. A practice that wins a face-to-face study and then discovers the access cost is finding out the hard way that the field plan belongs in the quotation rather than after it.

The obligation that gets skipped most often is the one nobody issues. Collecting information about identifiable people brings duties under the federal personal-data framework: what may be collected, the basis on which it is collected, what the respondent is told, how long the data is held, who else sees it and what it may be used for afterwards. No authority hands a research practice a permission for this, which is precisely why it is forgotten — there is no counter to visit and no document to put in a file. It sits on the practice, and it is at its sharpest in two places: the incentive scheme, because paying a respondent means holding his contact and payment details, and the client handover, because a client who asks for the raw responses with names attached is asking for something that may not be his to receive.

Sensitive subjects and sensitive respondents are the third area, and they are not a place to improvise. Asking people about their health, their medicines or their treatment, or interviewing children or patients, moves into territory the health authorities control, and the right order is to establish what is permitted before the questionnaire is written rather than after the fieldwork is booked.

Two smaller conditions complete the picture. A number published into the market is a claim somebody can rely on and can be held to, so a practice that puts out market sizes or share estimates should be able to produce the method behind them on request. And field staff are employees: interviewers and supervisors need work permits under whoever employs them, and staffing a wave with casual labour is an exposure rather than a saving, however common it is.

Both a mainland and a free zone licence can carry advisory and research work, and here the fieldwork decides it: a practice whose interviewers work across the emirates daily sits in a different position from one running an online panel for clients abroad. The emirate, the authority, the permitted wording and the premises conditions are specific to the case, and ConsultZone confirms them before anything is committed.

References

1. UAE Government portal — the federal personal data protection framework, and federal law and strategy generally. UAE Government portal
2. Ministry of Health and Prevention — control over medicines, medical devices and health products, and over what may be claimed for them. Ministry of Health and Prevention
3. Dubai Health Authority — health facilities in Dubai, which is where research involving patients or treatment has to be cleared. Dubai Health Authority
4. Ministry of Human Resources and Emiratisation — work permits and labour contracts for interviewers and field supervisors. Ministry of Human Resources and Emiratisation
5. Federal Tax Authority — tax enrolment and filing for the practice itself. Federal Tax Authority