How do I do market research on Korea when most of the data is in Korean?
I want to research the Korean market properly but the language barrier on data and sources is real. How would you approach it?
Comments 1
Pattern2026.05.19 02:13
The language barrier is real but smaller than it feels, because the most useful research material is more accessible than you'd assume.
Two things that helped me think about this. First, Korea has genuinely good public and government data — statistics agencies, city open-data portals, public institutions — and a lot of it is structured numbers, which translate far more easily than prose. You can get surprisingly far on quantitative sources with translation tools, because a table of figures doesn't need fluent Korean to read.
Second, qualitative understanding — how consumers actually behave, what the unwritten expectations are — is where translation tools fall short, and that's exactly where a trusted local person is worth more than any dataset. Pair the two: use public quantitative data for the measurable picture, and a local advisor for the texture the numbers miss. The mistake is trying to do all of it through translation alone — numbers translate, culture doesn't.
The language barrier is real but smaller than it feels, because the most useful research material is more accessible than you'd assume. Two things that helped me think about this. First, Korea has genuinely good public and government data — statistics agencies, city open-data portals, public institutions — and a lot of it is structured numbers, which translate far more easily than prose. You can get surprisingly far on quantitative sources with translation tools, because a table of figures doesn't need fluent Korean to read. Second, qualitative understanding — how consumers actually behave, what the unwritten expectations are — is where translation tools fall short, and that's exactly where a trusted local person is worth more than any dataset. Pair the two: use public quantitative data for the measurable picture, and a local advisor for the texture the numbers miss. The mistake is trying to do all of it through translation alone — numbers translate, culture doesn't.