Survey and consumer research platforms

Asking people what they think, before a brand decides what to say

Take the sports-shoe brand from Market Segments 13.4 and 13.5 again. Before it designs its new running shoe, or makes a single advertisement for it, it wants to know what runners think. How much do they pay for a pair? What do they dislike about the shoes they have now? Which of three launch videos do they like best?

Before a brand decides what to say, it has to find out what people think. This Market Segment is the software of asking them.

Market research used to be a services business. A research firm ran a focus group: a small group of people discussing a product, while the brand's team watched from behind a one-way mirror. Or it mailed a questionnaire to a panel, a fixed group of people who had agreed to answer. Those firms still exist. But the companies in this Market Segment sell the machinery that replaced most of that work:

The machinery that replaced the research firm is the online survey anyone can build, panels of millions of paid respondents, a marketplace that sells answers by the thousand, and newer tools that read a face or a voice.

The online survey

that anyone can build.

The panels

of millions of people, paid a few rupees or cents for each set of answers.

The marketplace

through which a researcher buys those answers by the thousand.

The newer tools

that read a face or a voice, for the reaction a person would not write down.

This is the half of the research industry that works to order, for one client at a time. The other half sells research data as a product to many clients. The best-known example is the data on what shoppers buy, sold by NIQ (formerly NielsenIQ) and Circana. (More on them in Market Segment 8.3, Market research and market intelligence providers, in Industry Vertical 8, Analytics and data providers.)

Every company named here has posted software engineering jobs in India. Famous companies that don't actively hire software engineers in India are left out.

This Market Segment covers six companies.

Keep reading, free

One more section is on this page: The survey, the panel and the newer methods. Sign in to read it here, in full.

Continue with Google

The survey, the panel and the newer methods

The survey, the panel and the newer methods

Back to the new running shoe from the start of this Market Segment. The brand's team starts with a survey.

SurveyMonkey

is the survey tool that most of the world has answered at least once. It is a self-service questionnaire: anyone in a company can build and send a survey with it, without hiring a research firm. It turned research from a commission, a study ordered and paid for from an agency, into something anyone could run. For a few years it traded under a corporate name, and it has since gone back to its own. SurveyMonkey hires in Bengaluru.

The panel is the second half of the business. The shoe brand wants answers from a thousand runners it has never met. So it buys them from people who have signed up to answer surveys.

Cint

runs the marketplace through which researchers buy responses from hundreds of panels around the world. It is an exchange for opinions, built like an advertising exchange, where advertisements are bought and sold automatically. Cint hires in Delhi NCR.

Dynata

is the largest owner of first-party panels: millions of people who have agreed to answer, recruited by Dynata itself. Dynata hires in Hyderabad.

Kantar

is the largest research group in the world. It hires in Bengaluru. Its Marketplace product is the automated, self-service version of the research its consultants used to do. (Kantar also appears in Market Segment 8.3, Market research and market intelligence providers, in Industry Vertical 8, Analytics and data providers.)

Two Indian companies bring the newer methods. Back to the three launch videos: a survey tells the brand which one runners say they like. These tools show how runners actually react.

Entropik

was founded in Bengaluru, and hires there and in Chennai. It sells emotion AI. As a person watches an advertisement or uses a website, the software reads their facial expressions, the movement of their eyes, and their voice. So the brand learns the person's reaction, not just their answer.

Consuma

a small Bengaluru company, sells consumer research that is automated from end to end. Social listening, reading what people say on social media, feeds the questions it asks. (More on social listening in Market Segment 13.4, PR, media monitoring and social listening tools.)

A survey tells the shoe brand which launch video runners say they like, while emotion AI reads their faces, eyes and voices to show how they actually react.

The respondent who is a model.

The newest idea in research is the synthetic respondent. An AI model is given what a type of consumer has said before, and then asked the question in the consumer's place. It is faster and cheaper than a panel, and nobody yet knows how far to trust it. Every company here is testing it. The panels are also fighting the opposite problem: respondents who are bots, programs pretending to be people.

A survey answer may come from a person on a panel, from a synthetic respondent that an AI model plays, or from a bot pretending to be a person, which the panels fight.

That is how the shoe brand finds out what runners think: a survey it builds itself, answers bought from a panel, and software that reads the reaction on a face.

Who they hire

Who these companies hire, and for what, is on What martech companies hire for.

← Previous in Martech

Creative tools, event platforms and creator marketing

Next in Martech →

Loyalty and rewards platforms