Market research, the old good way

Figures speak for themselves: the aggregated revenue for the 25 top companies in the market research business reached 18 bn $ in 2011, employing more than 110.000 workers worldwide. Concentration seems to be as well the trend: four of these global companies reached the 1 bn $ sales in 2011. Standard competitive market intelligence has become a must during the process of new product development. But, are these tools the holy grail to detect consumer insights and to guarantee a fast and successful launch?



Detecting unmet needs that will eventually become the spark that inspires a successful new product launch requires walking to our costumer's places and consumer's houses, to deeply understand how they live, work and feel. Nevertheless, the result of the ethnographic research that can be carried out by the innovation team is, usually, just a limited perception based on the insights gathered from a small sample of all our potential costumers.

When it comes to finding average mega trends, studying the chances of success of a new product prototype, identifying perceived attributes of our brand, or measuring the impact of our advertisement, we will most likely end up considering the services of a specialized market research company. According to marketing news, four companies top the list in market intelligence services with global operations and revenues over the 1 bn $ mark:

     Nielsen (New York) www.nielsen.com
     Kantar (London) www.kantar.com
     Ipsos-Synovate (Paris) www.ipsos.com
     GfK (Nüremberg) www.gfk.com


One interesting service of market intelligence for those working in the B2C businesses of food&beverages, personal care, household and pet products, is Mintel GNPD. GNPD stands for Global New Products Database, a service that monitors product innovation and retail success in consumer packaged goods markets, worldwide, in real time. The GNPD covers new product activity for competitor monitoring and  new product idea generation. Over 20,000 new products are added every month, from 49 countries worldwide.

Using both ethnographic research and standard market research techniques is considered a powerful combination to detect insights, and to estimate the chances of success for our new prototypes of products and services. One has to be aware, though, of the limitations of these techniques. On the one hand, disruptive innovations very seldom appear by just asking consumer what they want. On the other hand, estimation of the expected return of a new product or service using simulation like BASES comes at a price that might not be affordable for SMEs.