The views presented here, along with those of a host of other industry leaders supported by detailed data on the industry’s segments, were included in ESOMAR´s Continued Evolution of the Data, Analytics and Insights Industry report for 2020. A look at the past, present and future of the industry, and an essential tool in the management’s toolbox, this report is available at esomar.org/evolution-of-insights.
ESOMAR’s collaborator Jackie Rousseau-Anderson interviewed Fuel Cycle’s CEO Eran Gilad, and CPO Rick Kelly, about the state of matters on the Insights Industry, with particular attention to the Enterprise Feedback Systems segment. Other interviews in this series includes a take on Established Research, by Kantar’s Nathalie Burdet, one on DIY Research Platforms by SurveyMonkey’s Tom Hale, one on Consulting Firms by McKinsey & Co.’s Tamara Charm, and Candace Lun Plotkinand one on Digital Data Analytics by Salesforce’s Anouska Post.
Q: For readers who may not be familiar with your company, how would you describe yourselves?
Eran Gilad: I’d describe us as the first market research cloud. We fuse best in class technologies and solutions to help enterprises successfully mitigate the changes around us. We’re here to help decision makers make better decisions.
Rick Kelly: Instead of the current status quo, where a project is executed and a PowerPoint is created and put into a corporate SharePoint where it goes to die, we’ve built an ecosystem that allows all these various technology partners to integrate with us and to deliver any insight solution researchers need to the enterprise. The overall goal is to help decision makers make better decisions and reduce the latency between a business question and its answer.
| Top-5 largest companies within the Enterprise Feedback Systems segment | |||
|---|---|---|---|
| Ranking | Name | Headquarters | 2019 Turnover (US$m) |
| 1 | Medallia | San Francisco, California, USA | 403 |
| 2 | Verint Systems | Melville, New York, USA | 339 |
| 3 | MaritzCX | Lehi, Utah, USA | 210 |
| 4 | Podium | Lehi, Utah, USA | 134 |
| 5 | Reputation.com | Redwood City, California, USA | 131 |
Source: ESOMAR’s Evolution of Insights 2020
Q: How do you explain the juxtaposition between the low growth rates we’re seeing across the research industry generally and the accelerated growth you’re experiencing at Fuel Cycle?
EG: Before I agreed to lead Fuel Cycle, I spent a lot of time contemplating why the market research industry is in the state it is right now. Here we are, dealing with the smartest people in the industry and somehow their role and their budgets are shrinking. That cognitive dissonance was fascinating to me. We had high conviction that market research was one of those roles that is more important than ever, but we needed to reimagine the model because the common way of approaching research was broken. The way buyers are responding to the new research solutions in the market confirms this.
RK: There are anemic industry growth rates year after year but also new start-ups launching, disruptors popping up, investment money flooding in, and massive societal change. It doesn’t actually make sense why the consumer insights sector isn’t growing. When you really think about it, it’s because the model for the industry is fundamentally broken. We need to reimagine the model, reimagine the value chain for insights in a way that works for decision makers today. Data needs to be integrated, simplified, automated, and focused on decision-making insights.
Q: You see a big opportunity for market researchers in the future. Can you explain?
EG: We see a new frontier for market research that is much bigger than it is today. Running a business today is complicated and the need for proactive insights across the organization is more important than ever. Everyone knows that, but we have to shift our thinking on how we deliver that. Market researchers proliferate insights across the organization, all different types of departments, personas, and data types. We need to build solutions that empower market researchers to make that happen, so they can claim the true potential of their role in the organization.
Q: In this new frontier, what does research and insights look like?
RK: We think the future of insights looks more like business intelligence; it’s real-time, actionable information that’s coming to the business and to the owner of the particular business decision. Data is going directly to a Brand Manager or a Chief Product Office or a CX lead and putting data in the hands of the decision maker. Decision makers need tools and solutions that help them get to data and insights faster than how research has traditionally been delivered.
Source: ESOMAR’s Evolution of Insights 2020
Q. What role do vendors play in helping researchers reach the next frontier?
EG: It’s important to recognize that we need to support each other as we build toward this next frontier. There is no one-size-fits-all platform that can get clients from A to Z right now. But by partnering together, fairly, we can create the solutions that researchers need to get at the insights business decision makers are counting on.
RK: As we listen to the problems clients are trying to solve, it’s our responsibility to help them think of new ways to solve them and then facilitate the project execution in the way that works best for them. Need qual and quant in the same study? Okay, let’s make that happen, and seamlessly. We need to be thinking more about advancing the community of insights together.
About Eran Gilad
Eran has more than 20 years’ experience in business management, strategy, planning and execution, international marketing, strategic sales and channel development. He’s also a Managing Partner at Scopus Ventures, has a BS in Industrial Engineering from University of Coventry, England, an MBA from the University of Lund, Sweden and attends the OPM Program at Harvard Business School.
CEO, Fuel Cycle
About Rick Kelly
CPO, Fuel Cycle
Rick Kelly is the Chief Product Officer at Fuel Cycle. Rick has been with the company since May 2014 and holds an MS in Political Science from Utah State University and an MBA from The University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill.
