…our analysts on what it means in real life.
Archive for the ‘Market research industry’ Category.
It’s never a bad idea to invest in technology… right? Well at least many service providers of the Indian market research outsourcing industry certainly think so. Technology has always played a vital role in market research. It helps make processes more efficient, improves the quality of work, reduces errors and thus leads to lower overall costs.
Continue reading ‘MRO providers stocking up on technology?’ »
Analytics is a relatively new buzz-word in the outsourcing industry with a lot of service providers offering these services, either as a pure horizontal across industries or as a vertical specific service. With marketing services being outsourced, usually in a bundled format with customer support and other BPO offerings to “sweeten” the deal, there are elements of marketing analytics coming into the outsourcing foray. In a new HfS Research report co-authored by ValueNotes, titled ‘Where Offshore Analytics is Heading in 2011’, we have focused on the emergence of ‘horizontal’ analytics across services such as sales and marketing.
To define marketing analytics, let’s take a look at these two terms separately –
In his recent blog post, Tom Anderson commented about the trends that the market research industry would witness in the coming year. One of the trend that he talks about is the effectiveness of research. He points out that research can be called effective when it significantly drives bottom line results. In one of my earlier posts titled “Real time updates: Companies want to know now!”, I highlighted the value of real time updates that will help companies analyze data at a faster speed. With a constant flow of data, companies can take decisions quickly that would impact the bottom line of the business.
So how far have we reached? As per the “New Gen Market Research” Group MR trends survey, the top 3 answers for “new analytical techniques” that companies want to use were, Continue reading ‘MR techniques: to socialize or not to socialize’ »
Global market research biggies like Nielsen, TNS, IPSOS and Synovate have always been the water hole where all the Market Research Outsourcing (MRO) companies have been going to. Although the water has not dried, the water-hole has indeed become congested and competitive.
The top 25 market research agencies around the world contribute nearly 65% of the global market research revenues and have their presence across all continents. Indeed, that has led MRO companies to target the big guns to establish strong relationships with them. A strong relationship with an established market research agency offers an opportunity to build on the services capabilities of an MRO vendor, build credibility in the buyer market and of course, have a steady cash flow. However MRO vendors are also looking at the small and medium sized research agencies for business.
Although the top 25 global giants offer huge business opportunity, it has always proved a difficult segment to crack.
Continue reading ‘Market research outsourcing: shift in buyer landscape?’ »
The global market research (MR) industry has seen a decline in the past couple of years with revenues at $32.5 billion for the year 2008, according to a report by ESOMAR
Given the current recessionary crisis, although the MR industry’s overall growth has been slightly sluggish, it has shown better revenue figures when compared to other sectors. Global MR companies have resorted to budget cuts as one of the precautionary measures to deal with cost pressures caused by the recession. Budgets were slashed by 9.5% in 2008, and by 2.9% for the first half of 2009.
Market research industry: keeping a watchful eye
The market share of the top 10 research companies has been 55-60% for the past 3-4 years with established players diversifying and expanding their markets globally. Large global companies like The Nielsen Group, TNS, Kantar Group, Synovate, etc, have penetrated global markets and have established long-term relationships with FMCG companies and other industry leaders. The opportunity for mergers and acquisitions is very high in the global MR industry given the large number of unorganized and small players. Niche players, with regional expertise in markets like Latin America, Africa and Asia, are attractive acquisition targets for captives of large global MR firms.
Continue reading ‘Market Research: Shift from Reactive to Proactive’ »
Turnovers in research agencies are improving slightly, as per a survey conducted by MarketResearchAgencies.eu. The survey included 114 Market Research Agencies’ (MRA) members spread across the globe. Comparing the data from Nov’09 with a report published in May’09, only 45% of the agencies have experienced a reduction in turnover, compared to 60% in May’09.
Although this is a small sign of improvement, it does gives us a small peak into what we can expect in the coming 6 months. With the global recession revenue worm slowly ceasing to dip, a slow recovery growth rate will have a positive impact on the business of the research companies. On a more positive note, 36% of the respondents have seen an increase in their turnovers, compared to 20% in May’09. The cross-section would be of more interest, in order to see how big (in terms of scale and maturity) are the agencies who have claimed an increase in the turnovers in the past 6 months. It has been the relatively small-mid size companies that have been negatively impacted by recession. This cross-section becomes important, as we also have 23% of the respondents now that have experienced a substantial decrease in their turnovers, compared to 21% in May’09.
Continue reading ‘Turnover in market research: Snail paced recovery’ »
The global market research industry has been under strain with budget cuts and layoffs seen in the past 1-2 years. The impact of recession on the market research industry has also had a spillover effect on the Indian offshore market research vendors that has made vendors go beyond standard market research service offerings (Market Intelligence)
However of late we are seeing acquisitions and funding in the Indian offshoring service providers. Global knowledge services provider Integreon recently took over Grail Research. The company is a global strategic research and decision support firm, part of the US-based management consulting company, Monitor Group. With the global market research industry laying low for a while, it does provide Indian knowledge services and large IT/BPO players opportunities to acquire or form strategic partnership with onshore service providers. Indian onshore knowledge services providers have grown in the past 2-3 years in terms of scale and services maturity. Few of the larger players have established relationships with large clientele and are moving towards a more advisory role which has always been played by prominent market research companies like AC Nielsen, Synovate, TNS, Ipsos etc.
Continue reading ‘Of global recession and strategic acquisitions’ »
Margin pressures are a sign of maturity (and commoditization) in any services industry. Publishing outsourcing is no different. Low entry barriers have kept the wannabes pouring in, relentlessly setting up shop, offering ridiculously low prices … to a point where it won’t work any further. However, that hasn’t stopped any more wannabes from joining the game.
While this phenomenon on one side of the industry spectrum has led to rapid commoditization of services, it has also galvanized creativity amongst players on the other side. Innovations in productivity enhancements, process refinement and proprietary product development has become the new mantra for industry leaders, in order to stay in a profitable game. Today, prices have dropped to levels that have pushed struggling players out of business, while the larger players are desperately seeking opportunities to grow.
In my post titled ‘Recession in market research industry: Pandemic or Infodemic?’, I wrote about the effect of recession on the market research industry. It is clearly evident that the market research offshoring has taken a hit and corporates and market research agencies are evaluating avenues to cut costs without affecting productivity.
A recent report by Rock Hopper Research titled ‘Research Industry Trends 2009 Survey’ talks about the various trends witnessed in the market research industry for the current year. Apart from these, the report talks about the impact of recession on offshoring and the impact of social media research against the traditional research techniques. One finding which corroborates what I wrote in my blog was that the clients have become more demanding and want results faster. The other interesting finding from the report was that more and more (63% of the 512 respondent base) corporates are looking to conduct their own surveys with in-house staff and the internet. However, I still question how long corporates can sustain and add quality to research need by using in-house techniques, rather than entrusting it to experienced domain experts.
Continue reading ‘In-sourcing research: A strategic solution or cost-saving activity?’ »
In my post ‘Hear your customer’s tweet’ , I mentioned how companies and research agencies are looking to collaborate with small setups that have been tracking tweets or messages posted to social media websites in order to cull out information related to their company. Google recently launched ‘Google Social Search’ which will help users/companies not only track who is commenting what about a particular product/service but also help tracking comments from various social media websites based on the conditions set by the user. When I say conditions, it simply means that Google Social Search allows you to form groups of individuals whom you trust that will ensure guidelines are set for the kind of information is required from the search.
As rightly pointed out by Gary Boomer, President of Boomer Consulting, mentioned in his article, apart from tracking information and comments on websites, its important for companies to create communities where people with similar preferences and choices can be grouped to get an unbiased opinion about the company’s product/services. This can be similar to forming a panel for panel discussion. Information from social media websites is usually in a crude form, spreading from one medium to the other like wild fire. Creating a community would lead to a more focused approach to monitoring and tracking information in a format desirable by the company.
Continue reading ‘Google Social Search: Step in the right direction’ »
