From the 1980s until 2030,  an explanation of the flow of project contracts in the Market Research sector.
From the 1980s until 2030, an explanation of the flow of project contracts in the Market Research sector.

From the 1980s until 2030, an explanation of the flow of project contracts in the Market Research sector.

Until the mid-1990s, our industry was moving as usual: same methodologies, same companies, same tracking, same suppliers, and, apparently, everything was fine. End customers bought projects from agencies and, depending on the agency, had their own field area or resorted to third-party provider companies to work in the F2F or CATI field. This model has lasted for over 30 years. The deadline of a project could easily reach one month or more.

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The market research industry modeling began to change with the advent of the internet and all the innovations of tech companies. The emergence of online data collection (CAWI), which little by little, as the penetration of the internet began to spread around the world, acceptance increased, making it today the main type of data collection field work, CAWI brought speed in data collection with lower prices. (Data collection time decreased as penetration of the internet increased, from a month to a few weeks to a few days.)

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In the same wave, tech companies began to emerge, developing questionnaire programming platforms, CRM management, online communities, online focus groups, apps, and automated dashboards, giving rise to what we have today as DIY (do it yourself) platforms. It is getting cheaper and simplifies every operational part that involves a market research project. (With these innovations, the projects started to be delivered in days).

In this context, many end clients have begun to internalize the entire research process. We are starting to see a change in the modeling flow of purchasing research projects. End clients purchased directly from data collection companies with the help of DIY platforms.

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Today and in the next few years, with the volume of data generated by the final tech and mobile companies, they are almost self-sufficient. They have an unimaginable number of users, extremely valuable information on behavior and passive data, and the ability to send surveys directly to their users. Having passive data information through transactions, purchases, GPS, and so on. Being able to do from home what every insight seeker would like to have: a 360° approach (active and passive data collection together with the same user) is a dream. Being able to complete your project in hours and track and control it in real-time via a dashboard. These end clients, with so much valuable information, start to create business units to sell information and insights to other end client verticals. So that completely changes the structure of the game of our market research industry.

It can be said that we are seeing a shift, albeit discrete, from the classic B2B (read: end clients buying from agencies, fieldwork, and tech suppliers) to E2E (read: end clients buying from tech/mobile end clients) in our market research industry.

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