Six Gulf markets, run from Doha.
Coverage is not uniform and we would rather say so than claim it is. Lead times, panel depth and achievable shopper quotas differ market by market, and the differences change what a programme can measure.
What changes between markets.
The three things that most often affect how a multi-market programme is designed.
| Market | Languages | Typical lead time | Panel note |
|---|---|---|---|
| Qatar HQ | Arabic and English as standard, with Hindi, Urdu, Malayalam, Tagalog and Nepali available for interview work. | Two to three weeks from a signed brief to first completed visits. | Deepest panel of the six markets, with quota coverage across nationality, gender and age bands in Doha and the northern municipalities. |
| Saudi Arabia | Arabic-first. English available and appropriate for a limited set of segments; a programme run predominantly in English will misrepresent this market. | Four to six weeks, longer where a specific shopper profile has to be recruited in a secondary city. | Panel concentrated in Riyadh, Jeddah and the Eastern Province. Coverage in Makkah and Madinah requires shoppers eligible to enter the central areas, which is a recruitment constraint rather than a scheduling one. |
| UAE | Arabic and English, with substantial demand for Hindi, Urdu, Malayalam and Tagalog assignments. | Three to four weeks for client programmes. | The UAE panel is the second largest we operate and is recruited continuously. |
| Oman | Arabic and English, with Hindi and Urdu useful for parts of the retail workforce. | Four to five weeks, longer for Salalah outside the Khareef season. | Panel concentrated in Muscat. Salalah, Sohar and Nizwa coverage is arranged per wave and quota availability is confirmed at scoping rather than assumed. |
| Kuwait | Arabic and English, with Hindi, Urdu and Malayalam useful across much of the service workforce. | Three to four weeks. | Compact geography makes shopper scheduling straightforward; most of the estate is reachable within an hour of the panel's centre of gravity. |
| Bahrain | Arabic and English, with Hindi and Urdu useful across parts of the retail workforce. | Three to four weeks. | Small panel matched to a small estate. Complete network coverage is normally achievable within a single wave. |
Running one programme across several markets.
The instrument stays identical across markets or the comparison is worthless. What changes is the scenario, the shopper profile and the language of the visit — and each of those has to be adjusted without moving what is being scored.
Where a criterion cannot be observed in one market on the same terms as another, it is reported separately rather than folded into a regional average. A regional score that silently averages a full-coverage market with a partially covered one is the most common way multi-market research misleads the person reading it.
Fieldwork windows are aligned so that a regional comparison is genuinely simultaneous. Ramadan, national holidays and school terms shift by market and a wave that ignores them compares different operating conditions.
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