BTW, Just so people open their eyes and have an idea of contract amounts and who the major players are, more on how marketforce grew and who their clients are (This is a public article so I am not breaking any ICA):
This is from an article at the Business Insider:
CEO Karl Maier, board member Paul Berberian, and vice president of products and communications Rushton McGarr founded the Boulder-based company in 2005. In his prior experience as a CEO for organizations such as the Bank of Boston, Maier was responsible for consolidating and turning around multi-acquisition companies. At the conclusion of his last successful venture, he decided he was too young to be a "turnaround guy" and began looking for an opportunity where he could use his experience to grow a business. He identified the mystery shopping business as one that was ripe for transformation. It was an under-the-radar industry that had many small providers yet was used by most of the largest consumer-facing companies in the world. It was Berberian who suggested the mystery shopping industry when Maier was outlining his idea for a new venture; Berberian's father-in-law was a mystery shopper.
The company's product suites consist of two main types of services: on-site, and data and analysis. On-site services include competitive evaluation; quick service restaurant (QSR) price tracking; crisis management; on-floor setup solutions; theater checks to verify the showing of pre-feature advertising, gauge audience reaction to advertising, or confirm the presence and location of lobby displays; and movie film print checking. Data and analysis reports help companies to improve "return on information" gathered from sources such as mystery shopping programs, and also include training and rewards programs, text mining, and loyalty calculations. Other products include merchandising solutions, customer feedback surveys, brand and location audits, and a customer intelligence platform to tie all of the information together. The average contract is $250,000, and more than 80% of Market Force's revenue is recurring with 1- to 3-year contracts. The goal for the next two to three years is to have the customer intelligence solution embedded in the C-suites of Market Force's top 25 clients, who spend an average of $3 million a year with the company.
Market Force competes in various related markets. The market for merchandising is $1.6 billion and growing at 4% per year, according to industry associations, with several large providers. The market for mystery shopping is approximately $700 million, with relatively flat growth. Market Force is the largest provider following several acquisitions (e.g., Shop 'N Chek and Certified Marketing Services), but the industry is still very fragmented. The market for customer feedback (also known as C-Sat) is approximately $1 billion, and according to Gartner, growing at 39% per year; it is also fragmented. Finally, the market for auditing is approximately $500 million and is growing moderately, but no outside research vendor tracks this market independently.
In general, the competition is also fragmented by market. In mystery shopping, competitors include Service Intelligence, Corporate Research International, and BestMark. Empathica, Medallia (featured in Deal Radar), and Maritz are competitors in customer satisfaction, and Advantage and Crossmark in merchandising services. Market Force aims to offer a fuller breadth of service than its competitors and to develop technologies that can consolidate multiple types of customer intelligence into a decision support platform that quickly identifies problem locations and the analytics to help determine where companies should focus their attention. Further, the company is trying to use its size in mystery shopping in particular, and the expertise of its clients, to create a new market space it calls customer intelligence, which it defines as "business intelligence that business-to-consumer companies need to delight their customers."
Some of Market Force's acquisitions came with marquee accounts such as General Mills and Sony, and today it has more than 200 clients including McDonald's, Panda Express, Einstein Bros. Bagels, Target, Sears, Benjamin Moore, McCormick, Coca-Cola, PepsiCo, Kroger, Aldi, Warner Brothers, 20th Century Fox, HSBC, Jackson Hewitt, Verizon, and T-Mobile. Its top target segments are restaurants (quick serve, fast casual); retail (mass, specialty, fashion); consumer packaged goods; entertainment; grocery/convenience; financial services; and wireless/telecom.
Read more: [
articles.businessinsider.com]
And for those who want further reading:
[
www.sramanamitra.com]
"My belief is that if we can be a $100 million revenue business in the next two to three years...We pay contractor fees to 45,000 people every month... all 380 employees in the company"
Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 04/11/2012 12:50AM by KateH.