Innovative Buyers Take Risks, Push Boundaries, and Collaborate

Global companies thrive on innovation to keep pace with the changing market scenarios and to keep brands relevant for their customers.  This explorative and risk-taking mindset allows brands to expand horizontally and vertically across geographies and customer segments.  The consumer insights market plays a pivotal role in this ecosystem and is undergoing rapid transformations, as the digital and AI/ML mediums also usher in unprecedented connectivity, agility and information synthesis. The current ecosystem has seen a shift in how global brands engage with specialized partners to fuel innovation in the ever-evolving market research landscape.

As this year’s list rightly exemplifies: the companies that have empowered their teams and their external collaborators to push boundaries, have driven growth through exploration. These companies are willing to work with specialised tech-enabled insights companies to achieve agile impactful insights.

CPG companies have always been perceived as leaders in innovation in the research insights industry. Companies such as Unilever have been pushing the envelope by coming up with innovation platforms like Hive, which opens up collaborative & and presentation opportunities for the suppliers to bring forth new-age solutions. We collaborated with Unilever to incorporate methodologies such as consumer neuroscience and real-time behavioural tracking into interviews, using big data, artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) to deliver precise predictions and insights.

The Coca-Cola Company worked with us to pilot a hybridized research approach to bring agility and deeper human centricity in decision making. Our key takeaway from these associations is that companies that are on the GRIT list are willing to collaborate with research partners to experiment and test new methodologies. They are not fearful of failure and are keen to push the boundaries.

Multiple tech companies have also made it to the list this time.  Companies like Meta, Microsoft and Amazon, who are distinguished not only by their technological prowess but also by their ability to look for nuanced real- time insights to keep up with the constantly changing market trends, have collaborated with us to augment new age approaches for unveiling deep insights.

An important observation to note is that companies from the media, hospitality, travel and BFSI sectors are missing from this list. Our assumption is that most of these companies generate continuous consumer insights, but do so with their internal insights teams with their customer datasets. Therefore, there’s no top- of- mind recall of these companies in the insights industry.

Looking at the GRIT Top 25 List, it’s clear that the buyers are emerging as innovative leaders, and insights are undeniably a competitive advantage that plays a strong differentiator. But suppliers are also not lagging behind. They are a driving force in the ecosystem constantly identifying new methodologies and solutions or synthesizing existing solutions. At Borderless Access, we continually invest in market intelligence to identify possible new solutions that can be created using tech/AI-ML programs that enhance the insights generated and, are as close to real- time as possible while maintaining strict data quality measures and privacy protocols.