The 50 Most Innovative Companies in Market Research

What is GRIT?

The GRIT (GreenBook Research Industry Trends) Report is the leading survey of the insights industry worldwide. Over 30,000 market researchers, marketers, and executives—both clients & suppliers—use each edition to understand the trends impacting the industry and profession. They see GRIT as an invaluable resource to future-proof their organizations and careers, in ways both strategic and tactical.

The Business & Innovation Edition looks at the insights industry and individual organizations (on both sides of the table) in the context of their external environment. The report explores the challenges this environment creates and the opportunities it presents. We look at how external changes spur innovation and how they impact business outcomes, expectations, and strategies.

 

What is the GRIT Top 50?

For almost a decade, the GRIT Top 50 has become one of the key metrics many companies use to understand their position in the marketplace. It has also become a badge of “bragging rights”, with many companies proudly proclaiming their rankings in their own marketing campaigns. However, being on the GRIT Top 50 serves a far more useful purpose than an accolade; fundamentally, it is a brand tracker using the attribute of “innovation” as the key metric. It has become a reliable way for the players in the insights and analytics ecosystem to measure their own brand awareness and perception. 

 

The Process

The process is simple. Each year we measure how insights Suppliers and Clients are leveraging the brand attribute of innovation through a simple question series:

1. Using an unaided awareness verbatim question, we ask respondents to list the insights and analytics Suppliers they consider to be most innovative.
2. We then ask them to tell us of the Suppliers they listed, which do they consider to be the most innovative.
3. Finally, we ask another verbatim as to what factors make the Supplier they chose the most innovative.

We also ask respondents to help us segment the Suppliers mentioned in their responses into a few broad categories aligned with our overall segmentation schema.

Then, after rigorous data cleaning (see the Report’s Appendix for more details) and adhering to a set of rules we established based on industry dynamics, we simply count the mentions of each company. It is a pure “top-of-mind” question type with no prompting from pre-defined lists determined by us; GRIT respondents create the list based on their responses.

 

Now, after providing the appropriate context and other details, without further ado, here are the Top 10 most innovative suppliers from the GRIT Top 50 rankings:

 

Rank	Company Name	Mentions	2019 Rank	Change
1	Ipsos	190	1	0
2	LRW (Kelton Global + all LRW brands)	179	4	2
3	Hotspex	164	6	3
4	PRS IN VIVO (BVA Group + PRS IN VIVO)	140	14	10
5	Kantar (includes all products)	129	2	(3)
6	Zappi	107	5	(1)
7	Qualtrics	103	8	1
8	Nielsen (includes all products)	97	3	(5)
9	Dynata	96	9	0
10	Dig Insights (Dig Insights + Upsiide)	85	19	9

 

See the Full GRIT Top 50 List

 

About GreenBook

GreenBook is a leading voice in the market research and consumer insights space. We inspire, inform, and connect insights professionals across the globe through our online directory, webinars, articles, reports, and the IIeX global event series.