Research Live Industry Report 2025: The view from agencies and independents

As part of the latest annual Research Live Industry Report, insight professionals from Strat7, MTM, Savanta, GWI, Opinium, Do You Research and Future Studio discuss collective challenges and opportunities in the market research sector.

road surrounded by trees, marked with 2025 and start

Research agencies and independent insight consultants have faced challenging times in the past few years, with economic uncertainty hampering research briefs. Despite this, insights businesses are taking innovative approaches to ensuring the sustainability of their work, and they remain confident that the future is bright for the sector.

2024 was a tough year for the market research sector as the supply-side of the industry continues to feel the knock-on effects of client pressures.

“Insight teams are having to deal with unprecedented change – market, technology, socio-economic disruptions,” says Peter Kneale, strategy director at Strat7. “At the same time, they are under increasing pressure to deliver more, for less, keep up with new technology and have a greater impact within their businesses. We are also seeing budgets tightening, decisions taking longer and some re-structuring in the insights function (as well as in marketing teams). This has put increasing pressure on agencies to continuously innovate and explore new approaches that will give clients an edge; be more creative and demonstrate clear value propositions to win proposals/contracts and offer a more agile approach to working with clients.”

Graeme Cade, executive director at Savanta, says: “Global insecurity, inflation, and (lots of) elections have all contributed to nervousness across certain industries and markets, while AI (and in some cases perhaps unscrupulous companies offering dubious AI solutions) has led to an expectation of everything becoming quicker and cheaper. There’s still lots of opportunity out there, but you won’t catch it by standing still.”

Caroline Wren, managing director at MTM, says: “We’ve collectively weathered a storm of challenges – geopolitical tensions, a cost-of-living crisis, economic recession, and significant job losses among the tech giants and many other sectors.”

The industry has observed “stark impacts” from client reorganisations, causing months-long limbo periods until they are ready to produce briefs for strategic insights again, adds Wren, while increasingly complex procurement and legal processes in global client businesses have also slowed down projects.

However, Wren adds: “Despite these headwinds and shifting foundations, the fundamentals remain: the need for businesses to truly understand their target audiences, engage them in meaningful ways, and develop exceptional products and brands. Therefore, the need for a strong insight industry is as clear as ever.”

There is a sense that things are looking up. Business conditions in the sector are currently looking good, according to James McLintock, founder of insight collective Future Studio. Admittedly, this is from a “pretty low base by all accounts”, he says, adding that it was a bad year for both freelancers and agencies.

However, with 2024 a bumper year for elections, McLintock expresses optimism about the political outlook as fostering certainty for client brands. “The certainty on the UK and US governments for the next few years certainly seems to have increased client confidence, and Q4 has already brought a lot more briefs.”

Ella Fryer-Smith, founder of Do You Research, agrees there has been a positive shift. “After what has felt like a turbulent year for many in market research, things seem to be picking up quickly at the end of 2024, with projects moving where previously there had been delays,” she says.

Many freelancers have been quieter in 2024, adds Fryer-Smith, explaining: “A mixture of political turbulence (general elections), a difficult economy and perhaps the growth of AI and clients finding where and how it fits within their business has meant lots of decisions being stalled and projects not progressing as fast as they might otherwise, or not going forward at all.” As a result, some big agencies have limited how much they are spending on freelancers and kept more resource in-house as they aim to be cost-effective.

WHAT HAS WORKED WELL IN 2024?

Insight businesses are often best placed to help clients adapt and stay ahead, and so it’s no surprise that despite operating in a sometimes-challenging environment, agencies themselves can respond, adapt their services and spot areas of opportunity.

MTM’s Caroline Wren explains that the business has continued to invest in distinct, specialist teams with “deep craft skills”, that are often brought together into blended approaches. MTM, which originated in the media sector and later expanded through telecoms, technology and entertainment, has begun expanding further across sectors including finance, retail and lifestyle. In addition to its original service lines in commercial strategy and insights, the company built out UX research in 2023, growing its revenue from UX tenfold in 12 months, according to Wren.

In 2024, MTM has been doing more work with clients’ first-party data as part of its quantitative analysis, for example in hybrid first-party/third-party segmentations or analysis of subscriber retention drivers.

“The growth in availability and skillsets to work with first-party data has been accompanied by moves across the industry to bring research teams together with analytics teams and realise the benefits that integration can bring,” says Wren. “We believe that the future for research consultancies will involve greater literacy with client and third-party data sources so that we can all ensure our primary research is dovetailing more neatly with other evidence.”

The fundamental business need to understand consumers remains, and drives GWI’s growth, according to chief executive Tom Smith. He says: “Businesses all over are having to do more with less and faster, so we’ve focused on continuous innovation – investing in and building the tech, alongside rich global data, that will allow anyone to get a rich understanding of their consumers with ease and at speed. We are focused on delivering consumer insights to the whole organisation.”

For Opinium, growth has been driven by focusing on investments in people, says chief executive James Endersby. “Despite what people may think, market research is all about people. The people we interview, the people we employ, the people we work with.”

This has meant Opinium creating new approaches and techniques for data collection, hiring senior talent, boosting its training programme and working with clients to co-design approaches and programmes.

In the last year, the company has also continued its international efforts and invested in AI, adds Endersby. “We have continued our expansion into the US and Europe with both offices thriving despite difficult trading conditions. We, like every other agency, have also invested heavily in both analytics and AI but done so with the very clear objective that the efficiencies brought by these tools allow us to reduce our costs to clients, deliver results faster than ever before and allow us to allocate a far greater numbers of hours to client consultancy.”

Peter Kneale, Strat7, says the group has had a focus on three key areas in the past year: it developed an ‘ecosystem’ to offer clients access to the group’s strategic partners, specialists, and proprietary technology; it continued to focus on strong client relationships; and it had a big push to integrate AI technology and methodologies into client solutions.

From an independent researcher perspective, AI is also having an impact, says Ella Fryer-Smith. “Learning how to love AI and understanding more about how and where it can complement the human touch has been a topic for most of the sector, including for independents. As technology continues to evolve, so too will our learning.”

Simultaneously however, Fryer-Smith there has been some desire for a return to more face-to-face qual field work “to go really in-depth, counteracting all the big fast data sets”. She adds that Do You Research has seen more explicit demand for ethnographic learning.

AI: A CHALLENGE AND AN OPPORTUNITY

AI is indeed having a considerable impact on the insight profession, and 2024 was a year of learning and experimentation for insight partners. For many in the industry, it has become an embedded part of their offer.

However, there are also concerns. MTM’s Wren, when asked what she sees as the key challenge facing the sector in 2025, says: “With the explosion of AI, the sector will need to navigate the risks and rewards associated with its adoption. How and when we use AI models will be a key concern, especially when considering data quality, ethical considerations, and the effort required to upskill and reskill insights professionals, especially in rapidly changing areas such as privacy.”

Changing consumer preferences also need the insights sector to meet them with agile research methodologies while protecting the quality of insight, adds Wren.

For McLintock, the biggest challenge for the industry is “the obsession with speed” driven by what AI can achieve. McLintock says: “As David Abbott said, ‘sh*t that arrives at the speed of light is still sh*t.’ If the industry gets hooked on fast data, without checking whether those ‘insights’ align with what real people think, feel, say and do, we could end up with a lot of crappy decisions being taken. With lots more fast, low-quality research being done, it will be harder and harder for good research to cut through.”

Meanwhile, GWI’s Smith, says AI is both the “biggest challenge” and “the greatest opportunity” in the year ahead, saying that embracing AI in research requires “a close eye on quality and credibility”.

He cautions against AI being solely about accessibility, speed and cost savings, adding: “Poor data in, poor insights out. This amazing new tech needs to be built on a foundation of credible data, otherwise the trust will quickly be lost.”

LOOKING AHEAD

Smith says the potential of AI in research will become clearer as the technology gets more, better data behind it, but says: “It is a massive growth area.” Another growth area for GWI is making popular AI tools connect to its API. “We’re looking at data partnerships, which will mean customers can connect and compare different data and tools – the synergy between our data and these partners plays directly into getting better insights in less time,” Smith says.

MTM’s Wren expects to see growth coming from expanding the range of client stakeholders it works with, from heads of analytics to heads of finance and technology, given the “increasing integration between research and analytics of first-party data”, she explains.

Meanwhile, Savanta’s Cade sees growth potential in sharpening skills to augment the position of insight. “I think there’s big opportunities in building strategy and implementation skillsets. To me it’s an obvious extension of market research and a key way to help secure a position in those most important conversations.”

Continuing this theme, Endersby says everyone in the industry must work hard to improve its reputation and become more switched-on to clients’ challenges.

“We all need to become more attuned to our clients’ commercial reality and not be stuck in the original overly academic stance of banging on about methodologies, drawn out timelines and significance levels for hours. We need to get to the crux of it – what should our client do next? They need partners, not pawns. We need to attract more and more world-class consultants to our sector who can help us bridge this gap ASAP.”

This article was first published in December 2024 as part of the Research Live Industry Report 2025. Download the full report, including MRS League Tables, here.

Also in the report, clients share their perspective on the insight landscape.

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

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