Twenty-five years of growth and change in the market research business

John R Goodyear

Describes how changes in the last 25 years have transformed British market research from a cottage industry to big business; the part technology has played in this (and will play even more in the future); and how the increasing size and strength of the industry has led to increasing concentration of ownership, with 43% of turnover now held by just four controlling companies.

Twenty-Five Years of Growth and Change in the Market Research Business

John R GoodyearThe MBL Group

The present: a statistical snapshot

The world market for commercially-available market research is now well over US $5 billion in value: around 40 per cent is accounted for by Western Europe, 40 per cent by the USA, some 9 per cent by Japan and the remainder by the rest of the world.

Within Western Europe, the United Kingdom is the single biggest market, closely followed by West Germany. Best estimates put the commercially-available market research market in the UK in 1988 at around...

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