Ever tried to explain the insights industry at a party? It’s a mess. A sprawling, jargon-filled infinitely nuanced conversation that leaves most people nodding politely while their eyes glaze over. So, after years of trying and failing to explain the insights industry, I came up with a simpler way to think about it: The Five Families.
First, let's get the lingo out of the way. You’ll hear people say “market research,” but that’s like calling all music “classical.” The world has changed and moved on to the world of “insights”. A broader term for understanding people, no matter where the data comes from. So for our purposes, we’re talking about the insights industry.
So when thinking about the insights field, it's useful to classify the companies that operate in the industry into five big families, each with its own turf, its own racket, and its own way of doing things. Think of them as the Corleones, the Tattaglias, and so on, but with more data and fewer horse heads in beds.
Understanding these families is the key to figuring out how this whole ecosystem works, who holds the power, and provides a good framework for understanding the impact of AI. Let's meet the families.
The Consumer Data Family: The Hoarders
These are the private investigators of the insights world. Companies like Circana, Experian, and Affinity are in the business of knowing what people actually do, not just what they say they do. They are data hoarders, and their motto is simple: track everything.
They know what you buy at the grocery store, what car you drive, and what catalogs you get in the mail. They pull this off by tracking our digital footprints, scanning receipts, and analyzing credit card transactions. Then they package that behavioral data and sell it to anyone who wants a peek into the real world.
Any company with digital tracking can play this game. Walmart knows what you buy in-store and what you search for on their website. If you own a VIZIO TV they even know what you’re watching on TV (Walmart bought VIZIO). They blend it all together to get a scary-good picture of their customers.
The Hoarders are all about passive data collection at a massive scale.
Data Scale: Massive
Representativeness: Skewed to whatever they can track
Methods: Mostly passive tracking (1st/3rd party data)
Foundation: Get as much granular data as possible, by building new data collection pipes (direct, licensed, etc.).
The Media Research Family: The Scorekeepers
These are the umpires. The official scorekeepers. Having spent years at Nielsen, I can tell you that “currency” is the holiest word in the building. It's the dollar, the euro, and the gospel all rolled into one.
Companies like Nielsen, VideoAmp, and Comscore are obsessed with one thing: who is seeing what, where, and when. They measure TV ratings, website traffic, and podcast listeners to help advertisers plan their media buys and hold agencies & publishers accountable. They exist to create a single, trusted number that everyone agrees on so that billions of ad dollars can change hands without controversy.
A currency system is basically a planned monopoly. It’s great because everyone uses the same playbook. It’s terrible because innovation moves at a glacial pace and prices are, shall we say, not very competitive. If you want to know how many people saw that Super Bowl ad, you call the Scorekeepers. They’re not cheap, but they’re the only game in town.
Data Scale: Small (currency panels) to Huge (ad tech logs)
Representativeness: High (that’s the whole point)
Methods: A mix of panels (zero-party) and digital logs (3rd party)
Foundation: Be the one source of truth everyone has to pay for.
The Marketing Research Family: The Doctors
Think of these folks as the brand doctors. They show up after the party to tell you if your expensive decor actually impressed anyone. This family, which includes giants like Kantar and IPSOS, specialize in measuring the effectiveness of your marketing.
Did that clever ad campaign actually lift brand awareness? Is your new tagline resonating or falling flat? The Doctors answer these questions with brand trackers, ad tests, and copy tests. Their entire world revolves around influence. They want to know why you love Nike more than Adidas and what it would take to make you switch.
Here’s a simple way to split them from the Scorekeepers: Media Research gets your ad in front of eyeballs. Marketing Research figures out if those eyeballs cared.
Data Scale: Small
Representativeness: High
Methods: Almost entirely surveys (zero-party)
Foundation: Measure and track what influences consumers.
The Market Research Family: The Explorers
These are the curious folk who go exploring the wilderness of the consumer mind. The Explorers tackle the big, fuzzy, "what if" questions that keep executives up at night. They don’t just measure what is; they explore what could be.
Want to launch a product in Brazil? The Explorers will tell you what flavors they like. Need a new billion-dollar idea? They’ll run innovation workshops. Is your app confusing? They’ll do usability testing. They answer questions like:
Who are our customers, really? (Segmentation)
What do they want that they can’t articulate? (Usage & Attitudes)
How do they actually use our product? (Ethnographies)
This is the most bespoke family, filled with boutique firms and specialists who use everything from neuroscience to in-home diaries to find the answers. It’s all about exploring the unknown.
Data Scale: Small to Tiny
Representativeness: High
Methods: Anything and everything, but mostly zero-party (one-on-one interviews, surveys, focus groups)
Foundation: Answer tough business questions by talking to consumers.
The Customer Research Family: The Therapists
Finally, you have the "how does that make you feel?" folks. Companies like Qualtrics and Medallia are the therapists of the insights world, focused on customer satisfaction and experience (CX).
They live and breathe what it takes to get customers to stick around: Net Promoter Scores (NPS), customer feedback surveys, and journey mapping. Their goal is to figure out if your customers are happy, why they’re churning, and what you can do to make them love you again. Think of the QR code on your Walmart receipt or the automated email after a support call, that’s the Therapists at work.
Their secret weapon is technical integration. They plug directly into a company’s operations, turning every customer interaction into a data point. Because they’re so deeply embedded, their contracts are sticky, and their valuations are some of the highest in the industry.
Data Scale: Medium
Representativeness: Med to High (for existing customers)
Methods: Heavily zero-party, often automated
Foundation: Integrate into client systems and never let go.
What About the Other Players?
You might be wondering where companies like sample providers (e.g. Dynata, Cint, etc.) or consultancies (e.g. McKinsey, BCG, etc.) fit in. Good question.
Sample Providers are the arms dealers. They supply the firepower (respondents) to the families but aren’t a family themselves. They’re the neutral facilitators of the insights economy (even though many of them compete with the families).
Big Consultancies are like occasional hired muscle. They’ll swoop into the Market Research family’s turf for a big, strategic job, but they don’t live there full-time.
Research Platforms like SurveyMonkey are the tools that make the industry hum. They let anyone play researcher, for better or worse.
The Coming Shake-Down
So there you have it. The five families, each with their own turf, their own approach, and their own fragile truce. For decades, this is how the world worked. Of course, no single player in the space ever truly sticks to their own territory and there's often overlap. Kantar plays in Marketing Research and Consumer Data. IPSOS is across Market/Marketing and Customer research. Nielsen over the years has played in both Media, Consumer and Marketing Research. There's always plenty of motive for businesses to try and step into each other's territory.
But a new "Heisenberg" is on the scene. One that doesn’t care about tradition, turf, or taking prisoners. The territories that the five big families focus on is to big AI what an ant is to a car rolling down the road, out of sight out of mind. When Google rolled out news summaries into search there was no Machiavellian plan to kill the publishing industry, just a strong desire to improve the customer experience. Despite the best intentions, the mass adoption of Google as the home page reduced overall traffic to news websites. When Apple added the flashlight feature to the iPhone they weren't thinking about putting all of the iPhone flashlight app makers out of business, they were improving the experience. When it comes to AI, we'll likely see this routine repeated over and over. AI isn't setting out to change how the insights industry works, but in the pursuit of the best AI experience, it likely will.
So who's best protected in the wake of this coming change? Here's my two cents on some future outcomes:
Consumer Data: The biggest datasets are decently protected as unique sources of training data for AI models. Risks: predictive AI models that use smaller datasets and signal to adequately predict human behavior.
Media Research: Relatively well protected as the agreed upon currency of the industry. However, AI led approaches will continually nip around the edges of the industry until enough evidence gets an industry body interested. Risks: synthetic/hybrid measurement results in more accurate media measurement.
Marketing Research: Poorly protected from AI. Often these approaches have little in the way of protective moat on their approach. Switching costs are low and data sizes are often too small to make them extremely valuable training data. However, AI based automation and insights can drive unbelievable profitability for those who take advantage. Risks: AI native companies provide automated measurement and interpretation using combination of synthetic and hybrid data.
Market Research: Poorly protected from AI. This area is the most dynamic and exploratory of the families and most susceptible to AI innovation disruption. However, as realistic chat based qualitative methods grow this could be the dawn of a new age of at scale conversational research. Risks: AI native self serve systems that go from business question to AI generated answer using public data, company data, surveys, and synthetic insights.
Customer Research: Well protected from AI. These companies are part of the scenery. They're so well embedded into operational processes their renewal rate is least susceptible to risk from AI. Risks: The sales cycle on Customer Research is long, however, AI fueled new players in the space could take a swing with new AI driven insights into the relationship between customer satisfaction and corporate performance.
So there you have it. My thinking around how the industry is structured and how well insulated the various participants are from disintermediation. Would love to hear what you think, feel free to drop me a line.