Miller’s vision for community panel growth

Vision Critical’s new global CEO sees huge growth for community panels – and with $20m recently invested in the company, Scott Miller has the resources to make it happen.

Venture capitalists OMERS would seem to agree. Shortly before Miller’s promotion to global CEO last month, the company invested $20m into Vision Critical. Asked how he plans to spend the money, Miller says: “We’re still in the process of honing the priorities. But there is geographical and sector growth to consider, and we will also need to bring in new people.”

As far as geographical growth is concerned, Miller did not simply point to the usual emerging market countries. Instead, he explained that Vision Critical plans to “follow client needs” around the world. There are markets like the US and Europe, he said, which may be mature by the rest of the industry’s standards but which still have room for “an awful lot of development” in terms of community panels, Miller said.

Rather than spending the private equity cash on establishing local offices in each country, Miller said the firm’s strategy will continue to focus on finding and working with local partners to sell their products – as it has already done successfully in Asia and Latin America – with Vision Critical providing support at a regional level.

“I would say that the number of partner requests is accelerating at a pretty rapid rate,” he said. “There will be more partners signed in next three to six months because of demand in new markets.”

Miller reckons there’s a virality to the uptake of community panels which explains the rise in partner requests. “Nobody sells better to clients than another client,” he says. Meanwhile, Vision Critical helps spread the word by inviting existing community users to “client summits” where case studies and success stories are shared.

As more clients adopt community panels, Miller see benefits for researchers in terms of freeing up their time to focus on research and analysis, rather than getting bogged down in other tasks. “I think that the ecosystem of the future will see that the value proposition for market research goes up as they interpret and consult on the insight gained from community panels,” he said. “Then researchers will get to do all the things they were trained in at college.”

We hope you enjoyed this article.
Research Live is published by MRS.

The Market Research Society (MRS) exists to promote and protect the research sector, showcasing how research delivers impact for businesses and government.

Members of MRS enjoy many benefits including tailoured policy guidance, discounts on training and conferences, and access to member-only content.

For example, there's an archive of winning case studies from over a decade of MRS Awards.

Find out more about the benefits of joining MRS here.

1 Comment

charles@easyinsites.com

Agree with Scott, I founded EasyInsites just 3 1/2 years ago to specialise in community panels and have grown considerably since then with that particular focus. The majority of our clients are in the US and UK, supporting Scott's point that the mature research markets still have plenty of community/custom panel opportunity. Although we work primarily with end clients, we have experienced substantial growth in our work with other research agencies who seek our expertise in the build and management of these panels and want to outsource these tasks as well as the online fieldwork utilising these panels.

Like Report

Display name

Email

Join the discussion


Display name

Email

Join the discussion

Newsletter
Stay connected with the latest insights and trends...
Sign Up
Latest From MRS

Our latest training courses

Our new 2025 training programme is now launched as part of the development offered within the MRS Global Insight Academy

See all training

Specialist conferences

Our one-day conferences cover topics including CX and UX, Semiotics, B2B, Finance, AI and Leaders' Forums.

See all conferences

MRS reports on AI

MRS has published a three-part series on how generative AI is impacting the research sector, including synthetic respondents and challenges to adoption.

See the reports

Progress faster...
with MRS 
membership

Mentoring

CPD/recognition

Webinars

Codeline

Discounts