Brains against brawn
Article Date: Sep 08 2006
in association with Ernst & Young:
In an industry dominated by massive international agencies, successful medium-sized market research company BrainJuicer is a rarity. Founder John Kearon is determined to use the advantages of being smaller – creativity and fast footwork plus exploiting his own patented internet-based technology – to change the face of market research. Despite his remarkable success so far, his next great challenge is still ahead – taking BrainJuicer into the international marketplace where he can challenge the big agency players head to head.
The quiet, conservative, almost academic world of the market research industry is slowly becoming aware of a disruptive force at work. The foundations aren’t being shaken – at least not yet – but someone is banging uncomfortably loudly on the doors of the handful of major agencies that dominate international market research.
That someone is John Kearon, the ‘Chief Juicer’ of BrainJuicer – a young UK-based online research company. And Kearon is passionate about his mission to challenge the ‘pencil and clipboard’ conservatism of the established agencies. He has armed BrainJuicer with a suite of patented, innovative internet-based research techniques which Kearon claims produce better quality results than traditional research, in a third of the time and at significantly lower cost.
BrainJuicer was set up to break the rules. “The market research industry is dominated by $1bn plus turnover companies, and there are no intermediate sized players. My ambition is to change all of that,” Kearon says. It is no coincidence that BrainJuicer’s innovative research methodology is founded on use of the internet – a research medium that is still significantly under-used in Europe. Apart from making research faster and more cost-effective, the internet makes it possible for a relatively small, predominantly UK-based agency like BrainJuicer to offer research with a global reach.
What the internet cannot do, however, is replace overseas sales offices. Both winning new contracts and servicing major clients requires a presence in the territory where they are based, and in an industry dominated by large international agencies, winning overseas-based clients was always going to be critical to BrainJuicer’s future.
In the past year, Kearon has started to focus on taking the company’s client-facing activities into the international marketplace. With offices already established in Amsterdam and New York to supplement its London headquarters and Brighton operations base, BrainJuicer is gearing up to move into Shanghai later this year. The pace is rapid: “We set up our first international office in Holland in January 2005, followed by the New York office in September 2005, and we hope to open in China at the end of 2006 or early in 2007,” Kearon says. “The general model of business for our overseas offices seems to be that it takes about half a year for them to break even, and another six months before the business starts to really take off. “
Our office in Holland has just won a contract from Philips to act as its global agency for concept testing. It’s our first global contract from a blue-chip company, and it’s a massive step forward for us. We hope the pattern will be repeated in the US. We have now been there for six months and we are ready for the break-even point – our clients include some major corporations such as Proctor & Gamble, Wrigleys, Unilever, Sprint and Publicis.”
This restless, rapid pace of expansion has marked BrainJuicer’s progress from the start.
Kearon founded the company as a start-up just six years ago. Three years ago, he was still battling for his company’s existence – in his own words, “dodging the meteorites that threaten the very existence of start-up companies on a weekly basis”. For BrainJuicer, a kill or cure injection of private equity (one which, ironically, carried the potential to bankrupt the business within four months), was followed almost immediately by winning a breakthrough contract from Nike. These two events marked the start of a dizzyingly rapid rise in the company’s profile and success.
