Is ‘Market Research’ a Brexit-proof industry?

The turnover for the UK research and data analytics industry in 2016, exceeded that of the UK publishing industry (£4.4bn) as well as the games market (£4.33bn), toy sales (£3.3bn), and the music industry (£4.1bn).

To put its contribution to the UK economy in context with other industries, market research fares well and provides a significant boost to the UK economy.

The Global Market Research report also found that turnover amount in research spend in the UK, the second largest market in the world, dwarfs that of economic powerhouses Germany, France and Japan. Bringing in almost as much each year than those three markets combined.

According to the latest Global Market Research Report from ESOMAR, the international organisation for the research and insights community, prepared in association with BDO accountants, the overall market research industry continued to grow last year.

The global turnover of the research and data analytics market was £52.91 billion in 2016, an increase of 3.7% (before taking inflation into account), on the previous year’s turnover, the biggest growth in the global industry since 2010.

How did market research fare in different regions?

For Europe, the net growth was 1.6% and just under 1% in the US.

The five largest markets were; USA (£14.65bn turnover and 44% global market share), UK (£4.91bn turnover and 15% global market share), Germany (£2.05bn turnover and 6% global market share), France (£1.72bn and 5% global market share) and Japan (£1.4bn and 4% global market share).

In 2016, 36% of the United Kingdom’s research industry’s turnover was earned from international projects, only a very slight drop from 2015, indicating the news of Brexit did little to dampen the number international research projects being run out of the UK.

Spending by client segment

In the UK, the largest client segment of research overall spending last year continued to be Consumer Non-Durables at 30% of the total research spending.

This is followed by Government and Non-profit research at 14% and Media & Entertainment and Telecoms at 10% each.

Looking at the future

Two of the fastest growing areas have been social media monitoring and online analytics, with spending among social media networks up by 5%, and spending on online analytics up by 8%.

In the future there will be even more of a need for instant streaming snippets of observations and of insights for business decision-making.

Two-thirds of the countries contributing to this year’s report said that they believe that growth will continue even in the face of Brexit.

However, the increasing role that legislation is now playing such as the European GDPR and the Do Not Call Lists in the US and UK, will have an impact on how research is conducted in the future.