UK International Market Research Agency

It’s not often that you get the opportunity to get one up on your competitors but obviously when you have the chance like we have now you need to take advantage of the situation that it presents. Before we start you should be reminded that your respondent i.e. the person that you want to speak to/survey in relation to your research, is perhaps singularly the most important part of the whole research process. Without the correct respondent, regardless of whether you have the best research plan, focus group, survey, report, or similar, your findings will effectively come to nothing.

As you can imagine there’s cowboys in all walks of life including market research companies and just because someone’s a member of one of the many market research membership organisations, it doesn’t mean they’re good, far from it, often all it can mean is that they pay their membership dues. More over - and more worryingly - there is very little in the way of professional organisations that effectively monitor and ensure the services of so called respondent recruitment or market research online survey agencies, including the fact that the whole market research industry is in itself an unregulated entity.

Unlike MRFGR where all our respondent recruitment is carried out by our own full time, inhouse, specially trained team - who follow the rules and standards advised by the Market Research Society (MRS) - nearly 95% of our competitors are merely agents farming out the work to unregulated individuals whom generally have no formal training or safeguards to ensure not only full respondent turnouts but also respondents whom are correctly screened for the requirement at hand.

Unfortunately, as it’s a huge market and there’s potentially a lot of work out there, other market research recruitment companies - or as we’d rather call them ‘Agencies’ - can often be complacent and in the likely event they do get a poor respondent turnout or fail to screen respondents correctly - because they haven’t taken ownership of the job and haven’t worked on it themselves - it’s not a big problem for them as they can always blame their recruiter and correctly assume there’s more work elsewhere. Often in situations where our competitors are representing a larger client and where they’ve ‘fudged’ a job, we’re called in to help them out... not that they’d admit to this (sorry guys!)

Similarly, the same strict recruitment criteria is also applied to our online survey panels ensuring that - unlike the vast majority of the competition - our respondents are genuine people who only complete a survey if they fit the exact screening criteria. Additionally, and if required by the client, MRFGR can run non-anonymous surveys allowing the client to have access to those that have completed the survey and proving that we are using real people (something our competition cannot prove .... there’s not a lot you can do if your provider is hiding behind the fact they use ‘anonymous’ surveys. Test them and request non-anonymous access and see the excuses roll in).