Is there a future for the market research industry? Will Google meet all our needs in 20 years’ time and can we look forward to kissing goodbye, market research companies as we know them?
Companies (like B2B International) need to ask themselves what will the market research industry look like in 5, 10 and 20 years’ time. One thing that we do know is that it will look completely different. In the last five years there has probably been more changes than in the previous 70 years combined (tweet this). Online surveys have grown with a vengeance and are almost eclipsing telephone, face-to-face and postal surveys.
These reflections have been brought to the fore in a recent article published in ESOMAR’s RW Connect. The article talks about recent financial results from WPP. Sir Martin Sorrell, in explaining WPP’s recent results, makes the point that out of its $18 billion global revenues, $5 billion comes from market research and a further $4 billion from media planning and buying. In other words, data driven businesses account for a half of WPP’s revenues. It is clear that data orientated research and analytics is thriving and we can expect much more growth in our industry in the future.
