Primary research for ASEAN market expansion: tiers, insight cards, and cultural context
Read time: 7 min · Kasper-Tanakrit Sermsuksan, Founder, SEA Bridge
Secondary research tells you what the market looks like from the outside. Interviews tell you what it feels like from the inside. These are almost never the same picture.
Published data might show that Vietnam's food delivery market is growing at 20% per year. What it will not show: that the platforms taking share are doing so not through price but through hyperlocal community trust — and that a foreign brand entering without a local face will be perceived as an outsider regardless of product quality. Those facts exist nowhere in any report. They live in the people who have been there.
“The most important things about any ASEAN market are almost never published. They have to be heard — from people who have operated there, made mistakes there, and built trust there.”
— SEA Bridge
Three interview tiers: why skipping one changes the recommendation
Not all interviews produce the same information. Skipping a tier — most often the expert tier — is the most reliable way to produce a recommendation that misses the real structural dynamics of the market.
Tier 1 — Potential Partners
Distributors, co-delivery organizations, institutional partners in the target market. These conversations reveal what it actually takes to work together: what conditions partners require, what margin they need, what they have seen kill similar deals. This is the tier that surfaces the unwritten rules of how business actually moves in the market.
Tier 2 — Market Experts
Investors, industry insiders, senior operators who see across the landscape. One good expert interview can save months of trial and error. These are the people who have watched multiple companies enter the market and know which mistakes repeat.
Tier 3 — The Client's Actual Customers
Not the institutional buyer, but the end user. For a food brand, this is the consumer. For an education program, this is the student. An administrator saying "our consumers would love this" and the actual consumers saying "I would not pay for this at that price" is a deal-level finding that changes the recommendation entirely.
Culture, trust, and the things that are not on paper
This is the part of ASEAN expansion that most outside advisors underestimate. Not everything about how a market works is documented. Relationships that took years to build. Trust that transfers through introductions. Decision-making styles that vary not just by country but by industry and generation. The fact that in some markets, the formal agreement comes after the relationship, not before.
These intangible assets are real. They are the difference between a market entry plan that looks right and one that moves. An advisor who has operated in the target market holds knowledge that no secondary source can replicate. Cultural context is not background colour — it is a professional deliverable, named explicitly in the final recommendation.
For ASEAN specifically: language signals respect. A foreign company that invests in local-language communication, local-language content, and local-facing teams is perceived differently from one that treats the market as a translation exercise. That perception affects partnerships, pricing negotiations, and customer trust at every stage of entry.
Building the interview guide from real research gaps
The right interview guide is built from the unanswered questions left by Block C research. Not general questions about the market — specific hypotheses that secondary and digital research could not verify.
Each question should trace to an assumption. "What is the most frustrating thing about how international brand partnerships currently work in this market?" is useful if you have already formed a hypothesis about where the friction is. Without that context, it produces a different answer from every person you ask, and synthesis becomes much harder.
The insight card: the standard for what "documented" means
Every interview produces one insight card, completed within 24 hours. Six fields: who was interviewed and how they were reached, their relationship to the market, three to five key insights written as complete sentences with evidence, one opportunity or risk flag not found in Block C, a hypothesis update, and a cultural context observation.
The insight format matters: "[Finding] because [evidence from the interview]." Not "they prefer local partners" — that is a label. "Administrators prefer local delivery partners because three previous foreign-delivered programs encountered faculty resistance, and they named two specific examples" — that is a finding with evidence. One belongs in a report. The other does not.
Synthesis: patterns, not summaries
Synthesis is identifying patterns across multiple independent interviews and stating what they mean for the decision. Not what each person said — what the aggregate reveals.
Count signal strength per theme: how many different interviews contributed to each pattern? Seven out of ten pointing to the same finding is a market reality. One interview is an interesting lead. Look specifically for contradictions — they are not confusion, they are findings about segment differences.
Further reading
Working on an expansion into ASEAN?
SEA Bridge supports companies in Wellness & Longevity, Food & F&B, AI & Digital, Creative Economy, and Education across Southeast Asia — from market diagnosis through to go-to-market execution. We bring both the methodology and the network to make things move.
Get in touch: team@seabridge.space
REAL CASE · SEA BRIDGE ADVISORY
AirAsia Academy Education 5.0 · Thailand + Malaysia
Challenge: Needed a new product concept to increase revenue for their AirAsia Academy unit. The challenge was not market research — AirAsia already had significant data on its own users. The challenge was understanding what job students in the AirAsia ecosystem were hiring an education product to do, and whether a gamified language learning product integrated into the SuperApp would match that job.
What we delivered: Consumer research across education and language learning behavior in the AirAsia user base. Product concept development integrating language learning into the SuperApp with gamification mechanics and a phased marketing plan. The insight that changed the concept: users hired the SuperApp for convenience and discovery, not dedicated learning — the product had to fit existing behavior, not ask for new behavior.
A Note for ASEAN1967 & B2M Fellows
Your cultural context is not a soft addition to the insight card. It is often the finding that changes the recommendation. A Fellow who has spent time in Vietnam, Indonesia, or the Philippines holds knowledge about institutional dynamics and social norms that no published source can provide. That knowledge is a professional asset. Use it explicitly, named and evidence-based, not as background colour. The advisor who can say "in this market, trust must be established before the formal agreement, not after — and here is what that looks like in practice" is providing something a client cannot get anywhere else.
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