BUSINESS PROFILE

Tell us a bit more about your business and how it started .

Prior to the emergence of the Internet , market research had always mainly been conducted over the phone or face to face , which by its very nature was a slow and laborious process . But in the late 90s when the Internet was emerging , I recognised that the industry could be transformed by creating pre-recruited panels for online surveys that would get customer insights to decision-makers within organisations much more quickly .

Drawing on my years of experience working at Kantar , one of the largest market research agencies in the world , I saw this revolution in the industry start to take hold . I always had ambitions to be an entrepreneur , and this gave me the reason to launch QuMind in 1999 – literally starting off by working on a laptop in my kitchen .

Organisational decisions for marketing or product innovations , as just two examples , had always taken an age to get consumer feedback due to these traditional methods . This led organisations to often ignore consumer feedback and needs , basing decisions on the gut feel of senior leaders within a business . This narrow scope led to a high percentage of product failures and campaigns that were unable to deliver on objectives . The idea that you could get consumer feedback , almost in real-time to ideas , concepts and marketing material was the backbone of why I built QuMind to solve this critical business issue .

How has the business grown since it started and how did you ensure growth ?

We started building platforms for social communities , online surveys and focus groups using our own technology from 2001 , so we were able to turnaround projects quickly and easily and had complete control over the delivery process . One of our very first clients was Sainsbury ’ s , where we built a customer community from scratch for the company in 2002 . We were one of the pioneers in creating client-specific customer panels and communities so that brands , such as Sainsbury ’ s could be even more in tune with the needs and changing habits of their customers and use this to make the right decisions .

QuMind sells a market research platform which provides consumer feedback to decision-makers quickly . It was founded in 1999 by the company ’ s CEO , Mark Ursell . He told Intelligent CXO about how the company ’ s offering has changed since it first started to meet the demand for faster consumer insights .

Six years ago , we started selling an ‘ always on ’ platform directly to clients which has worked really well as the demand for faster consumer insights has only increased and is now a core part of decision-making in consumerfacing businesses .

So , gradually we ’ ve changed from being a full-service agency to a research technology business and now predominantly sell our platform with support rather than managing the whole process , so the business has changed quite radically since we started out . The original principle of QuMind still exists though – ensuring consumer feedback gets to decision-makers quickly and enabling them to get closer to their customers on a more frequent

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