consumer-insights
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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
i-Genie.ai
i-Genie.ai is an AI-powered consumer insights platform that replaces traditional surveys and focus groups by synthesizing hundreds of billions of digital signals - Google searches, social posts, transcribed videos, ratings and reviews - into real-time, actionable intelligence on what consumers think about every product, brand and trend. Its agentic copilot Presto lets marketing, insights and innovation teams ask natural-language questions and get data-backed answers across 25+ countries and 20+ languages. Major consumer brands including Unilever, Coca-Cola, Kenvue, Bayer, Danone and Clorox use it to spot trends, benchmark brands and accelerate product R&D.
Locala
Locala is a French-founded omnichannel advertising platform that helps global brands plan, buy, and measure multi-location marketing campaigns. Using location data, consumer-mobility signals, and machine learning, it connects online ad spend to real-world outcomes like store visits and foot traffic. Formerly known as S4M (Success for Mobile), the company rebranded to Locala in 2022 and works with brands including L'Oreal, Volkswagen/Audi, Subway, McDonald's, Nespresso, and L'Occitane.
MakerSights
MakerSights is a San Francisco software company that gives consumer brands a Voice-of-Consumer platform for testing product ideas before they are made. Founded in 2015, it lets apparel, footwear and accessories teams put concepts, line plans and assortments in front of thousands of real target shoppers in hours, helping them make fewer wrong bets and cut down on overproduction. Its newer MakerLabs offering uses AI-trained digital twins to deliver synthetic consumer readouts in under an hour. Brands including New Balance, Madewell, Champion, Ralph Lauren and Hoka use it to align what gets made with what people actually buy.
QualSights
QualSights is a Chicago-based insights technology platform that helps brands decode real-world human behavior. It blends the depth of qualitative research with the speed of quantitative methods through patented always-on Smart Sensors, a mobile video participant app, and AI-powered analysis - capturing how consumers actually use products in everyday life. Trusted by Fortune 500 brands in CPG, pharma, and technology.
Suzy
Suzy is a New York-based AI consumer intelligence platform that lets enterprises run quantitative surveys, qualitative interviews, and conversational research against high-quality consumer audiences in a single connected system. Founded by serial entrepreneur Matt Britton in 2018, Suzy reframes traditional market research as a real-time 'Decision Engine' that turns fragmented marketing intelligence into action for brands like Microsoft, Google, PepsiCo, Netflix, and Coca-Cola.
The Harris Poll
The Harris Poll is one of the longest-running public opinion and market research firms in the United States, tracking the sentiment, behaviors, and motivations of American adults since 1963. Now part of Stagwell (NASDAQ: STGW), it pairs decades of polling heritage with AI-powered research tools such as the Harris Quest suite, advising leaders, brands, and institutions on how to anticipate change and act with confidence.