Choosing a market research firm in Vietnam: what to buy, and what to ask before you sign

A research brief for Vietnam usually arrives with one sentence at its centre: we want to understand the market. It goes to three or four firms found through a directory or a regional colleague, and the proposals that come back are hard to compare because each firm has quietly answered a different question.

One proposes a nationwide online survey. One proposes focus groups in two cities. One proposes desk research and interviews with distributors. All three are competent. The brief simply did not say which job the research was for, so each firm sold the job it is built to do.

This piece is about choosing between them: the kinds of supplier working in Vietnam, what each is suited to, whether a Hanoi or Ho Chi Minh City base matters, where the cost of a study really comes from, and the questions worth asking before anything is signed.

Start from the decision, not from the market

The single most useful line in a brief is the decision it feeds. Not "understand Vietnamese consumers of skincare", but "decide whether to launch the mid-priced line or the premium line first, and at what price". A decision tells the firm what has to be measured, how precisely, and among whom. A topic tells it only where to look.

Three questions turn a topic into a brief:

• What will we do differently depending on the answer? If no answer would change the plan, the study is description, and a cheaper source may already have it.
• Who has to believe the result? A figure that has to survive a board in another country needs a method that board recognises. A figure used by the local team to choose between two creative routes does not.
• How precise does it need to be? Choosing between two price points three dollars apart needs a far larger and tighter sample than establishing that a segment exists at all.

The answers usually narrow the supplier on their own. A study that has to be compared with results from other markets points one way; a study that has to find out how a category is actually bought in Vietnamese points another.

Four kinds of research supplier, and what each is built for

The firms offering market research in Vietnam fall into roughly four groups. The lines blur, and some firms span two, but the group a firm mainly belongs to tells you what it does best and what it tends to subcontract.

Two practical consequences follow.

First, a proposal from one kind of firm will rarely recommend the method of another. A panel company proposes a panel survey; a consulting firm proposes interviews. That is not bad faith, it is what each can deliver at its best. Comparing their proposals on price alone compares different products.

Second, many good studies use two of them. Desk research and trade interviews to establish the structure of a category, then a targeted survey to size the part that matters. Buying that as two pieces, each from the firm built for it, is often cheaper and better than asking one firm to stretch across both.

Hanoi or Ho Chi Minh City: does the firm's base matter?

Firms are often searched for by city, and the instinct is sound: the two largest markets differ in ways that affect most consumer categories. Buyers in the two cities do not respond to the same message, price or channel in the same way, and a plan built on one city's result will tend to misread the other.

What matters is not where the firm's head office sits, but who does the fieldwork in each place, and under whose quality control. A firm headquartered in Ho Chi Minh City with its own interviewers in Hanoi is in a better position than one with two offices where the second recruits through a subcontractor nobody has audited. Neither arrangement is disqualifying; not knowing which one you are buying is.

Three things to establish before the proposal is accepted:

• Who recruits and interviews in each city, and whether those teams are employees or subcontractors.
• What proportion of interviews is checked, by whom, and how — a call-back to confirm the interview happened, a review of recordings, a check on completion times.
• What happens outside the two cities. Da Nang, the central coast, the Mekong Delta and the secondary cities of the north are where many national claims quietly stop being true. A study that says "Vietnam" and samples two cities should say so on its first page.

What an online panel in Vietnam can and cannot represent

Online surveys have made research in Vietnam fast and affordable. Most adults are online — DataReportal's "Digital 2026: Vietnam" counts 85.6 million internet users at October 2025 — and a panel study of a few hundred respondents can field within days.

Being online and being on a research panel are different things, though. Panel members are people who signed up to answer surveys, usually for small rewards, and they tend to be younger, more urban and more active online than the population they are asked to stand in for. That is not a flaw in any particular provider. It is how panels are built everywhere.

Whether it matters depends on the question:

• For a brand selling online to urban consumers under forty, a panel may be close to the right audience, and its speed is a real advantage.
• For a mass-market product sold through neighbourhood shops, or bought by older households, a panel will describe a narrower market than the one you intend to enter, and national percentages drawn from it will mislead.
• For business buyers, panels rarely reach the people who actually decide. Recruited interviews are slower and dearer, and usually the only honest option.

Ask for the panel's own profile by city, age and income, and ask how the results will be weighted to the audience you care about. A firm that answers clearly is one whose numbers you can defend. A firm that answers "nationally representative" without the profile is asking you to take that on trust.

Where the cost of a study actually comes from

Sample size is the line clients look at first, and it is rarely what drives the price. The larger driver is incidence: the share of people screened who qualify for the study.

An illustrative example, with invented figures. A brand wants 300 completed interviews with women aged 25 to 40 in two cities who have bought an imported skincare product in the last three months.

The sample the brand asked for is the same in all three rows. The work is not. This is why two proposals for "300 interviews" can differ several times over in price, and why the tightest definition of the target group is often the most expensive line in a brief.

Other factors add cost in a predictable order: face-to-face fieldwork instead of online, each additional city, senior business respondents, qualitative groups with a moderator and a viewing facility, and translation and reporting in English. None of these is a reason to drop them. Each is a reason to be sure the decision needs it.

Ten questions to ask before you sign

These are the questions that separate proposals which look similar on paper. A good firm answers all of them without difficulty.

• Which decision is this study designed to support, in your own words?
• Who will run the fieldwork in each city, and are they your staff?
• What proportion of interviews is quality-checked, and how?
• Who is in the sample, and who is left out — by age, income, city and channel?
• If an online panel is used, what does its membership look like, and how will results be weighted?
• How will the questionnaire be translated, and will it be back-translated and piloted?
• What incidence have you assumed, and what happens to the price and timeline if it is lower?
• Will we receive the raw data, the final questionnaire and the weighting method, not only the report?
• Who presents the findings, and is that person involved in the fieldwork?
• What will the report say where the data is not strong enough to conclude anything?

The last question is the most revealing. Every study hits a point where the sample becomes too small or the answers too mixed to support a conclusion. A firm that plans to say so plainly is one whose other conclusions you can rely on.

A brief, rewritten

The difference between a topic and a decision is easiest to see side by side. Below, the same foreign snack brand's brief in two versions.

The second version is not longer because it is more demanding. It is longer because it tells every firm the same thing, so the proposals become comparable, and so the eventual report can be judged against whether it answered the question.

Research that describes, and research that decides

A last distinction, because it decides whether the money is well spent. Much of what is sold as Vietnam market research is description: market size from a published report, a list of competitors, a summary of consumer trends. Description has value, and some of it is available for far less than a bespoke study costs.

What rarely exists off the shelf is the answer to the specific decision an entrant faces: whether this product, at this price, sold through this channel, will find enough buyers in this city. That answer has to be built — from desk research and interviews first, then from primary data only where the decision genuinely needs it. The order matters. A survey commissioned before the structure of the category is understood tends to measure the wrong things with great precision.

For a consumer goods brand, the structure is also where marketing for the category in Vietnam is decided: which channel a buyer uses for which purchase, and what the price has to survive once platform fees and promotions are taken off. A study that ignores that layer will size a market the brand cannot reach at the price it planned.

Where this work stops

MWY does not run fieldwork or own a panel. Vietnam Market Research is six weeks of desk research, platform and marketplace data and interviews with people who work in the category, written toward the decision it has to support: whether to enter, which segment and city first, at what price. The same research opens Go-to-Market Strategy, which adds the entry plan. Where a decision genuinely needs primary consumer data, the survey is scoped and quoted separately, or placed with a research firm we introduce and take no commission from.

What MWY adds is the part a supplier cannot do for itself: writing the brief around the decision, reading the proposals side by side, and judging the findings from the client's side of the table. How that fits the wider sequence of an entry is set out under market entry, and the method behind it is on the methodology page. Once the brand is selling, whether the plan is working becomes a monthly question, answered through Vietnam Marketing Advisory & Oversight.