An introduction to the Market Research Industry. An Ever-Changing Map

Many of you reading will be like me, finding yourself working in Market Research (MR), happy working in MR, but had no idea how big the industry was before you entered, and growing up aspiring to work in something completely unrelated! The infographic below goes some way to showing you how big our industry is and how closely we are related to marketing agencies and communications companies. The conglomerates that own many of the smaller companies also have their hands in other, unrelated companies, creating diverse investment portfolios. And they plan to buy more.

I’ve worked in Market Research for four years now and in that blip of time I’ve seen many changes to the industry landscape already. I remember being at Ciao Surveys (remember them?) during the buying and selling between Microsoft and Toluna and indeed, when writing this blog and creating the infographic, there were further mergers and takeovers which I had to speedily update in my Prezi. If, like me, you get the daily email from Research-Live.com, you can understand even further how ‘promiscuous’ MR can be with key managers, CEO’s and VP’s etc moving from client-side to agency-side and beyond, carrying with them the knowledge gained from the last place.

Here is a map showing who owns who, who’s absorbed who and the key clients of some of the companies. You will see that key clients are shared by some companies, but the reality is that these key clients are shared by even more MR agencies.

While looking at the infographic, other things will start to become clear….if Ipsos buy Synovate, they will be huge and there will be a clear four horse race between Cello, WPP, Ipsos and Nielsen (in terms of MR). If Aegis acquire more MR agencies, they will certainly be part of that race too.

I’ll let you all make your own conspiracies, but in the meantime, please enjoy the MR Map! Zoom in to find further comments and links and zoom out to see how all the companies are joined together.

All information has been gained from completely public information such as press releases, client owned websites, agency owned websites, news stories, Wikipedia and hard-back publications. I have not used any confidential information to create this blog and the infographic herein.