by Daniel Granderson
November 27, 2018
MarketResearch.com, the leading research aggregator and parent company of Profound, The Freedonia Group, Packaged Facts and Simba Information, celebrates its 20th year in business.
CEO Rob Granader shares his opinion on this dynamic industry:
Twenty years ago I was checking my LG flip phone waiting to see whether our offer to buy FIND/SVP’s published products division was accepted. Before the iPhone, before Google, before Facebook even before we were Marketresearch.com, we were trying to help customers find the market research they need, as our first website proclaimed.
Since 1998 we have navigated the Clinton/Bush/Obama/Trump presidencies, Y2K hysteria, September 2001, the financial crisis of 2008, the Google realignment of 2011, seven acquisitions and eleven office moves in six cities.
But the biggest change to our industry has been the implosion of corporate libraries and the explosion of available information, regardless of its worth.
We went from a landscape where people reached for numbers like water in the desert. And now they are “drowning in numbers.”
We went from a landscape where publishers were as trusted as Walter Cronkite. To a place where publishers pop up as easily as new websites on GoDaddy.
Were customers better served 20 years ago when they had fewer publishers?
Was Market Research more reliable when everybody knew the publishers?
It’s still about whether the information serves the client’s need. Some clients need market research to tell them where to go, others need it to confirm where they are going, and still others are just trying to get smart quickly.
The space Marketresearch.com occupies in 2018 is very different from 1998 with terms and ground rules that we couldn’t have imagined. However, our job is more critical as it’s not about just finding the right report, it’s about verifying the publisher, the data, the methodology and all that happens before the report is produced. And then our job continues as we work to fill in the gaps, the unanswered questions, the living report.
"Success is not final; failure is not fatal: It is the courage to continue that counts."
Onward
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