Part
01
of one
Part
01
What online marketing research subscriptions are critical for a marketing research company to have and how much is the subscription cost for each?
The top online marketing research subscriptions, apart from Acxiom and Nielsen Scarborough, of which you're already aware, include Euromonitor, Plunkett Research Online, Mintel, Kantar Futures, and Profound. Below, and in the spreadsheet, you'll find a deeper dive of my findings.
findings
Euromonitor offers a site-wide research monitor subscription for $5,000 annually; their research indexes 80 countries, which offers "snapshots" of 117 industries across a smaller subset of 18 countries. While distributed globally, with a total of 15 offices in North and South America, Europe, Asia, Australia, and the Middle East, their single American office is in Chicago (contact info in the spreadsheet). Euromonitor is one of the largest, widest-reaching market research companies, winning many awards for their work.
Plunkett Research Online provides research across 37 industries and offers four subscription plans, ranging from the "Basic" package at $89/month for a single-user view-all no-export access, to a $1,995/year single-user with-exports "Pro" package, to the $3,995/year "Pro Team" package, providing full access and exports for up to five users. There is a fourth "Library" package for "multi-user subscriptions and large enterprises," for which potential customers must request a price quote. Plunkett has an extensive client list (10,000) from a huge range of industries and organizations. With over 20,000 people accessing their research everyday, they were vital to include here.
Mintel provided the least hard data of the five companies discussed here; prices can be obtained by calling either their Chicago or New York offices (contact info in the spreadsheet), and while they did not disclose the exact numbers of industries or countries they cover, they claim to offer "fast access to market share, market size and forecasts," with "robustly tested, rigorously assessed ... In-depth market studies that give you objective assessments of consumers, competitors, products, and risk." Mintel have a heavy product focus, but accordingly this makes them one of the biggest and deepest market research firms on this with over 33,000 new products added to their databases monthly.
Kantar Futures appears to be the second most globally-established of the five companies discussed here (following Euromonitor), with offices in South America, Europe, and the Asia Pacific, along with domestic offices in New York, Chapel Hill, and San Francisco (contact info in the spreadsheet). They offer two subscriptions: one for global monitoring, and one focused on the United States. Prices were unavailable for both. Their areas of expertise include lifestyle insights, automotive, youth trends, healthcare, and digital technology. Kantar factor as number three on the AMA's "Gold" list, warranting their inclusion here.
Profound provides an aggregate access to "more than 1,060,000 market research reports across nearly 700 industry segments from more than 200 publishers." Like Plunkett and Kantar, they offer multiple subscription options: a single-user license and a corporate-wide subscription. Rates were not listed on the website, but can be obtained by contacting them at either their headquarters in Rockville, MD, or their New York offices (contact info in the spreadsheet.) Profound is an amalgamator, compiling over one million reports from almost 200 sources. They have one of the largest company taxonomies to find targeted research quicker.
conclusion
In conclusion, based on the information publicly available, Plunkett Research Online may offer the lowest-priced introductory subscription option, while Euromonitor and Profound provide the clearest sense of the scope of their (extensive) available informational resources; of those two, Profound's approach appeared to lean more heavily on data from outside sources, while Euromonitor's approach indicated a more in-house approach to data collection. Euromonitor also seems to possess the greatest global scope, with offices on all continents except Africa, followed by Kantar. Mintel provided the least amount of hard data on their available informational resources, although Kantar was similarly vague when it came to concrete numbers. However, most of these companies offer free demos and research samples (links to relevant request pages in the spreadsheet), and all provide quotes to interested purchasers (contact info in the spreadsheet.)