June 26, 2007
Quest conducts major study about Saudi Youth
Quest Consulting has recently completed a lifestyle study of Saudi teenagers aged 18-24. The company utilized qualitative research techniques and ethnography to speak to a cross-section of Saudi teens in the three main urban areas of Jeddah, Riyadh and Dammam.
(PRWEB) September 9, 2004 — Significant differences were found between young men and women. Young men tend to feel powerless and alienated from the rest of society. Young women, on the other hand, are very pro-active and seeking a wider role in society. They see themselves very much as pioneers and are keen to break down barriers in the workplace and to become good role models and contribute to the development of society.
QUEST has also developed the REACT® model which provides insights into the types of brands and activities that capture their imagination. The REACT® model helps us to understand why Saudi youth love certain brands and can also act as a marketing checklist to help create advertising and promotions to better engage them.
The cost of this study is $12,500.
Quest Consulting
QUEST is a specialized research company devoted to uncovering human insights about consumers in the Middle East. It provides these insights to multi-national and local companies to help them develop more impactful marketing communications.
The company was set up by Ken McDermott (Mohammed Suhaib), a British Muslim who has been working in the Arabian Gulf since 1985. We spoke to him:
Q: HOW DID YOU COME TO EMBRACE ISLAM?
A: I came to the Gulf in 1985 when I joined a market research company called MERAC in Bahrain. In the consumer research projects that we were conducting, there were often references to Islamic guidelines, which we did not truly understand. I thought that it was beholden on me to read up on Islam, to help me to do my job better. That sparked an interest that eventually led to me embracing it. That was 15 years ago and I am pleased that the worst fears of my friends have not materialized. I have a loving wife and 5 amazing children and I count my blessings every day.
Q: WHY DID YOU DECIDE TO SET UP QUEST?
There has been a marked shift in our industry in recent years. Clients have become significantly more demanding and are seeking genuine insights that they can use to maximize the impact of their marketing campaigns. Insight is perhaps the most overused word in research nowadays. Most research companies talk about it in their credentials presentations, but a lot of this is mere lip service. Real insight does not come easily. To me, a pre-requisite is that the researcher should have an insatiable curiosity about local consumers and to be engaged in an ongoing quest – hence the name – to get inside their heads. Too many researchers are expatriates who know that they will go home in a few years anyway and are therefore reluctant to make the time investment required. I have been lucky enough to have been able to become associated with insights in this market and thought that now was the right time to do my own thing.
Q: WHY DID YOU DECIDE TO CONDUCT THE SAUDI YOUTH STUDY?
We all know that the local population has a very young age profile – 70% of Saudis are under 30 years old – and yet the feedback I was getting from advertising agencies was that there was much that they did not know. This was despite the fact that many of the leading multinationals have invested considerable sums in youth research in the past. We decided to take it on as a challenge and to lay down a marker on what we are all about.
Q: WHAT PROBLEMS,IF ANY,DID YOU FACE?
With regard to young females, it was relatively straightforward. We were fortunate to have the services of some excellent female moderators and the girls were very ready to talk. It was almost like a dam breaking – information came gushing out. With the guys it was much more difficult at first. In the Gulf, there is the principle among men of being ‘katoom’ i.e. reserved. Being too talkative is taken as a sign of weakness. A conventional research approach was producing the same kind of drab, uninspiring findings that the advertising agencies had been complaining of.
Love Hina Music Downloads
RCA RS2052 Rip & Go Digital Music Studio
The silver-plastic finish and chrome buttons and trim of the main unit are complemented by a blue-backlit LCD set in a dark gray rectangle, creating a fairly classy-looking profile on a bookshelf or desk. The speakers do not come with grilles; the woofers and tweeters are each protected by two thin chrome bars. The magazine-style CD changer holds five CDs, and you can listen to one disc while you swap out the others. On top of the main unit is a standard-size USB port in a recessed area for the bundled MP3 player, which is the only one that is directly compatible with the system. The inclusion of an SD card slot left us wondering: If you can get your music onto an SD card, you probably own a computer, in which case you wouldn’t really need this system. Another baffling question is why RCA includes the card slot on the main unit but doesn’t let users transfer songs from an SD card to the MP3 player.
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The CD player plays MP3/WMA CDs as well as CD-R/RW and standard audio CDs. The SD slot and MP3 player both support MP3s up to 320 Kbps and WMAs up to 192 Kbps. When playing music from CDs or an SD card, the Rip & Go’s sound quality is very good, with strong, deep, defined bass, clear mids, and crisp highs. Unfortunately, when we recorded tracks to the MP3 player, we found that the sound quality suffers significantly upon playback. This is because the recording is done in MP3 format at a fixed 128 Kbps, which is clearly meant to compensate for the player’s small capacity (it can hold approximately 2 hours of music at that low bit rate). We were, however, able to load and play 320-Kbps MP3s on the player using our PC. You can also record audio via the auxiliary stereo RCA inputs at 128 Kbps, and the system does FM recording, too, but at only 96 Kbps.
The basic ripping process is quite easy even for technophobes; all you need to do is press the Record button, and then hit Play on the CD player. The interface shows the elapsed and remaining time as well as the file name—which unfortunately doesn’t include any track or artist info. This means that when you take the MP3 player on the go, you won’t have any information about what you’re listening to other than how long the track is, though it does separate the tracks for you.
Browsing recorded files is also a bit unwieldy because of the cryptic automatic file names, which appear differently on the player than they do on the main display. The bare-bones directory tree structure may be unfamiliar to users with little or no computer experience. And although the LCD is brightly backlit in blue, the text is so large that it doesn’t fit well on the screen. The interface could have been designed in a far less clunky fashion and still retained its simplicity. Thankfully, however, the UFO-shaped remote control provides access to all the main unit’s functions. It’s actually easier to control the main unit and the MP3 player’s interface via the remote, because there are dedicated buttons for just about everything.
The MP3 player is fairly small and light, measuring 2 by 2.8 by 0.8 inches and weighing a mere 1.8 ounces. It runs on a single triple-A battery, which the company claims delivers 20 hours of playback. We wish it had more than just 128MB of memory, but that does help keep the overall cost of the system down. Still, we’re not sure how many people are in the market for a portable device that holds just 30 songs of fairly low sound quality.
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Redemption song: before the music, Detroit singer Kem embarked on a spiritual journey that saved him from a life of drugs and alcohol
As a child, I had low self-esteem and was introverted and shy. Singing was the one thing that helped me come out of my shell. I’ll never forget how alive I felt after I mustered the courage to sing George Benson’s “On Broadway” for my middle-school class. All that positive attention boosted my ego a bit. But my insecurity had little to do with adolescence and everything to do with being a victim of sexual and emotional mistreatment. Early in my childhood I was sexually abused. And I grew up in a dysfunctional home. Now I see that those experiences led to my retreat into drug and alcohol addiction.