Andrew asked:

I am planning on starting a business dealing with Japanese tourists, specifically gold and ski packages. I would like to do some market research but am unsure whether I should hire a Canadian or Japanese company to do the work. Second, do you have any suggestions on how to locate companies that do such research?

Doug Marshall answered:

First of all I think you would have to define the type of research you are going to do. Are you going to be researching what golf and ski packages are available in Canada, or are you going to research people in Japan who would want to take advantage of these? It depends on what you want to know.

If you can define your research questions specifically you can seek advice from Canadian companies. For example, if you want to know what parts of Canada Japanese tourists visit that could be done fairly easily from tourism organizations. A Canadian company could do that very easily.

If you want to know from the point of view what type of person in Japan would want to take advantage of a golf and ski package, that would probably be a Japanese company that could look at that aspect.

As far as locating research companies that have this capability, if you're looking for a research company in Japan, our Canadian Embassy has commercial officers there who would be very pleased to provide anybody with these types of capabilities.

If you're looking for capabilities in Canada, and this is a tourism area, I would suggest going to tourism organizations because every province has their own tourism office.

With a little bit of digging I think the information should be easily available. Now if you want to do some original research that may involve some more time at a higher cost.

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