consumer-insights
(39)
The Number Behind the Number: How EMARKETER Became Marketing’s Reality Check
Every pitch deck needs a number that survives the meeting. EMARKETER built a business by producing those numbers - then showing marketers where they came from, what they mean and how much confidence to place in them.
The PR Firm That Turned a Hot-Sauce Account Into a 36-Year Moat
HUNTER began with one food client in 1989. Thirty-six years of TABASCO later, the agency's real product looks less like publicity and more like sustained attention - measured in culture, commerce and trust.
The 1,600-Person Answer to a Simple Question: What Do Customers Really Mean?
Escalent has assembled researchers, data scientists, community builders and brand strategists into one decision-making machine. Its pitch is practical: let AI find the pattern, then keep a human expert responsible for what it means.
Bazaarvoice Built the Plumbing Beneath the Five-Star Economy
Every star rating looks tiny. Bazaarvoice turned billions of them into retail infrastructure - then began teaching that infrastructure to speak to creators, social platforms, and AI shopping agents.
InMarket Wants to Measure What Happens After the Ad
The Austin marketing platform follows advertising beyond the click - into stores, shopping baskets and sales reports. Its bet is that marketers will pay for evidence of outcomes, not another dashboard of impressions.
The Receipt Is the Research: How Numerator Turns Shopping Trips Into Market Intelligence
A rewards app collects the receipts. A global measurement system turns them into a living map of consumer behavior - linking what shoppers say to what they actually buy.
Stephan Czypionka Is Measuring Dumplings and Cataloging Palm Trees
The Austrian marketer has spent a career translating taste across borders. At CJ Foods, his playbook pairs hard measurement with cultural curiosity - the same instinct behind a side project cataloging hundreds of palm species.
Hakuhodo Spent 130 Years Learning to See the Whole Person. Now It Is Teaching AI.
The Tokyo agency built its identity around a stubborn idea: a shopper is a person before they are a target. Its next act is turning that idea into AI personas, commerce infrastructure, fandom strategy, and business design.
Stagwell
Stagwell wants to prove that an advertising holding company can behave like a software business without forgetting how ideas are made. Its bet is a network where polling, media, creative agencies and AI products share the same wiring.
Gail Horwood
From hand-built recipe pages to highly regulated brand storytelling, Gail Horwood has spent three decades asking the same useful question: what does the audience need next?
Jennifer Bentz
Jennifer Bentz spent three decades learning how shoppers reveal what they want. Now Utz Brands’ chief marketing officer is turning that habit of attention into a playbook for a century-old snack company: sharpen the portfolio, test early, and let evidence earn the next bet.
Lauren Beckstedt
Lauren Beckstedt turned an unusual detour through talent strategy into a playbook for unifying more than 60 marine brands - while keeping her eye on the people who actually climb aboard.
CMNTY Corporation
CMNTY spent years turning the messy work of listening to customers into one research room. Now, under MarketResponse, its mix of communities, live conversations and analysis shows why the best insight tools do more than count answers.
Lava Kumar
Lava Kumar is the co-founder and Chief Product Officer of Entropik, a Bengaluru-based Emotion AI company that reads human reactions across facial expression, voice, gaze and attention. After nearly two decades building products at Yahoo, Motorola, Wipro, Operative and Integral Ad Science, he returned from the US in 2016 to co-found Entropik and turn affective computing into a working business tool. He leads Decode, the company's integrated human insights platform, and has become a recognizable voice arguing that market research should measure how people actually feel, not just what they say.
Populix
Populix is an Indonesian technology-driven consumer research company that connects businesses, academics and government bodies with a verified panel of more than 700,000 respondents across Indonesia. Founded in 2018 by Cambridge graduates Timothy Astandu and Eileen Kamtawijoyo, it blends a mobile respondent app, a self-serve survey platform (PopSurvey) and AI tooling (the NeXa research assistant and synthetic respondents) to deliver market, policy and society insights faster and more affordably than traditional survey agencies. The Jakarta-based firm has raised about $14.2M to date, most recently a $4.3M Series B in 2025.
Dana Kim
Dana Kim is the co-founder and CEO of Highlight, a New York-based product intelligence platform that modernizes in-home product testing for consumer brands. A former qualitative market researcher who spent years collecting insights the slow way - standing in stores with paper surveys for brands like Coca-Cola and Nike - she went to Wharton for an MBA, met co-founder Ethan Kellough, and built a technology-driven alternative that pairs a proprietary consumer community with logistics automation and AI analytics. Founded in 2020, Highlight has raised more than $30 million and works with brands including Nestle, Procter & Gamble and Mondelez. Kim has been named to GreenBook's 2022 Future List and Inc.'s 2024 Female Founders 250 list.
Potloc
Potloc is a Montreal-based market research technology company that runs an AI-powered, all-in-one survey platform built exclusively for management consulting and private equity firms. Founded in 2013 by HEC Paris graduates Rodolphe Barrere and Louis Delaoustre, the company pioneered social-media sampling to source hard-to-reach B2B and B2C respondents, and today handles the full research workflow - questionnaire design, sampling, live fieldwork monitoring, data-quality control, and AI-assisted analysis. Potloc has served 500+ global firms and collected hundreds of millions of survey responses across industries and geographies.
Tastewise
Tastewise is an agentic AI platform built exclusively for the food and beverage industry. It combines proprietary consumer panels, market trackers, and trillions of real-time food signals with AI agents trained on food behavior to help brands spot trends earlier, validate new products, win retail and menu placement, and automate marketing and sales. Its tools are used by a large share of the world's leading F&B companies, including Mars, Nestle, PepsiCo, Kraft Heinz and Kroger.
Cinarra Systems, A Softbank Company
Cinarra Systems is a location intelligence and measurement company that turns carrier-grade mobile network data into privacy-safe marketing insight. Founded in 2012 and now a wholly owned SoftBank subsidiary, Cinarra works with mobile network operators to power audience segmentation, store-visit attribution and cookieless targeting - processing billions of daily location signals inside the carrier's own data center so no personally identifiable information ever leaves. Its platforms (RealSight, VitalSight, RealPeople, VenueVitalics) link online ad exposure to real-world venue visits for advertisers and turn telco data into a new monetization channel for operators.
Rodolphe Barrere
Rodolphe Barrere is the co-founder and CEO of Potloc, a Montreal-headquartered consumer research platform that pioneered survey sampling through social networks. Born in France, he moved to Quebec at 17 to study at HEC Montreal, worked briefly at LVMH in Paris and New York, and founded Potloc in 2014 with classmate Louis Delaoustre. He was named to the 2021 Forbes 30 Under 30 Europe (Technology) list and has raised more than $90M for the company, which now serves consulting firms and private equity clients across offices in Montreal, New York, Paris, London and Dubai.
Ario
Ario is a Palo Alto company that turns real, consent-based, SKU-level purchase history into behavioral intelligence brands can act on. Founded in 2022 by a team of ex-Shape Security security and data-privacy veterans, Ario started as an AI personal assistant built to offload the 'invisible labor' of family life admin, raised a $16M seed in 2024, and has since evolved into a B2B data platform - Ario Link and Ario CoreLens - that lets shoppers share their own verified transaction data so companies can see what customers actually buy, including off their own shelves, without surveys, panels, or bots.
Getwizer
Getwizer is a New York and Haifa based consumer insights company that pairs an AI research engine, WizerOne, with in-house human research specialists it calls Wizers. Using a modular building-block approach, teams run concept tests, brand tracking, ad pre-tests and deep consumer profiling and get cleaned, analyzed insights in as little as five days. The pitch is a hybrid model: automation and machine learning handle the heavy lifting while experts shape the questions and interpret the answers, aiming for custom research that is faster and cheaper than a traditional agency.
Native AI
Native AI is a New York-based market intelligence platform that uses generative AI to build 'Digital Twins' - AI-powered proxies of real consumers assembled from reviews, interviews, surveys and other first- and third-party data. Brands, agencies and market research firms use the platform to chat with clones of their target audience, track products and competitors across the web, and forecast consumer reactions in real time, compressing research timelines that once took weeks into minutes. Founded in 2019 by Frank Pica and Sarah Sanders, the company raised a $3.5M seed round in 2023 and says clients have generated over 275 million Digital Twins to date.
Dan Leahy
Dan Leahy is the co-founder and CEO of MakerSights, a San Francisco consumer-insights platform that helps apparel, footwear, and accessories brands decide what to make before they make it. His pitch is blunt: the fashion industry still builds product the way it did in the 1980s, guessing at what shoppers want and burning through unsold inventory in the process. MakerSights collects consumer feedback at scale and ties it to real sales data so brands like Ralph Lauren, New Balance, Everlane, and Madewell can produce less waste and more of what people actually buy. Before MakerSights, Leahy founded Savored, a restaurant yield-management startup acquired by Groupon, and cut his teeth in finance at Silver Lake and Brown Brothers Harriman. A Maine kid who once mailed handwritten letters to NBA stars begging for autographs, he built a career on the same stubborn premise: ask enough people for what you want, and enough of them say yes.
Jonathan Gardner
Jonathan Gardner is the founding CEO of Harris Quest, the AI-powered research and brand-management platform built by The Harris Poll and Stagwell's The Marketing Cloud. Appointed in December 2025, he brings more than 30 years in market research and polling, including nearly a decade as Chief Operating Officer of The Harris Poll and senior operating roles at Penn Schoen Berland, Subject Matter, and The Marketing Cloud. He began his career writing in the Clinton White House speechwriting office, and now translates decades of client-side research craft into software.
Nihal Advani
Nihal Advani is the founder and CEO of QualSights, a Chicago-based insights technology platform that helps global brands decode real-world human behavior through live video, mobile ethnography, sensors and AI. A former internationally ranked junior tennis player from India who came to the US on a full scholarship, he cut his teeth at Google and Microsoft before founding the travel startup Georama in 2012, then pivoting it into QualSights in 2018. On roughly $3.5M raised over a decade, he built one of America's fastest growing market research companies, ranked by Inc. as the fastest growing company in Illinois.
Alexandra Frankel
Alexandra Frankel is the CEO of Getwizer, a New York-based hybrid consumer insights platform that fuses AI automation with human research expertise to run fast, custom, modular studies for brands like Mars, Coca-Cola, Paramount and Puma. A McGill-trained psychologist with a master's in quantitative methods from Columbia, she rose through roles at Nielsen, Ipsos, NBCUniversal, Simulmedia and Hotspex before spending five years at Getwizer as head of insights and strategy, then taking the top job in February 2025. She has two prior research-startup exits (to Nielsen and Ipsos), two industry innovation awards, a notable streak of NFT consumer studies, and a nonprofit children's book venture, Rainbow Zebra Co., built around teaching kids kindness.
Frank Pica
Frank Pica is the CEO and co-founder of Native AI, a New York market-intelligence platform that builds AI-powered digital twins - synthetic consumer personas drawn from billions of real data points - so brands can interrogate their customers in real time instead of waiting weeks for surveys and panels. A repeat operator who helped scale Decide from three people to over a hundred and launched Adyoulike in North America, Pica is betting that consumer research is going through a renaissance, and that generative AI is leading it.
Quid
Quid is an AI-powered consumer and market intelligence platform that reads billions of structured and unstructured data points - news, social posts, reviews, patents, forums - and turns them into business outcomes. Born from the 2020 merger of NetBase (social listening) and Quid Inc. (AI text analytics and network visualization), the company now sells a workflow platform (Q Platform) and a library of AI agents (Q Agents) so brands can see what's coming and decide what to do about it before competitors do.
Rakuten Advertising
Rakuten Advertising is the global affiliate and performance-marketing arm of Japan's Rakuten Group. Born as LinkShare in 1996 and acquired by Rakuten in 2005, it connects the world's top brands with publishers, creators and highly engaged audiences across 200+ countries. Today it pairs a pioneering affiliate network with AI-powered tools for fraud detection, partnership discovery and reporting, while pushing influencer and affiliate marketing closer together.