Admission Document - BrainJuicer

PART I
INFORMATION ON THE GROUP
Introduction
BrainJuicer carries out quantitative online research using innovative, bespoke software to produce insightful
market research for large, multinational companies, including 10 of the world’s top 50 companies (FT 500
September 2006).
BrainJuicer operates in a growing sector of the US$23bn global research market, namely quantitative online
research. BrainJuicer’s main competitors are large traditional market research providers who have dominated
the market for off-line market research, such as AC Nielsen, Millward Brown, Research International and
Taylor Nelson Sofres.
Whilst the largest traditional research companies have developed their own online capability, BrainJuicer has
a number of key attributes which have contributed to it achieving rapid growth and winning contracts with
prestigious clients, including:
• Ascaleable online-onlybusiness model.Unlike the traditional research companies who maintain
both on and offline data collection capabilities, BrainJuicer is able to focus on operating a scaleable
online-only business model.
• Research platform that delivers greater diagnostic insight. BrainJuicer has developed tools and
award-winning techniques that enable it to provide a greater level of diagnostic insight into
quantitative market research. These techniques enable clients to enhance their understanding of
consumer preference and help them make decisions on the best way to develop their products and
services.
• Speed. BrainJuicer’s automated research techniques enable it to conduct complicated studies very
quickly. BrainJuicer’s rapid deployment and results production, even on multi-country studies,
provide clients with a speed to market advantage in the development of new products and services.
To date the Group has conducted projects in over 50 countries and more than 30 languages and has
established offices in the UK, the Netherlands and the US.
The Group’s revenues come from full service market research work, and from its online Juicy Brains Panel
in the UK.
History
The business was founded in December 1999 by John Kearon. John had previously set up and run Brand
Genetics Limited, a development agency originating new products and services for a number of FT 500
clients. Prior to this, John had been a Planning Director of one of the UK’s leading advertising agencies and
a senior brand manager at Unilever. As a producer, consumer and commissioner of market research for over
15 years, John found traditional market research to be slow, expensive and either lacking in depth if it was
quantitative research or lacking in accuracy if it was qualitative research. He believed there was an
opportunity to improve the insightfulness of quantitative methods. Furthermore he believed that other
research agencies were employing higher cost business models, existing methodologies and had not
traditionally been very innovative or fast moving. In 2000, online research was emerging in the US but was
almost non-existent in Europe.
The founder devised an online, automated system for eliciting and structuring more open-ended qualitative
responses as part of a more closed-ended quantitative research project. The algorithm underlying
BrainJuicer’s MindReading software allows respondents to enter unique answers and then processes those
answers, based on the number of times the answers appear into a self-structuring, hierarchical map of what
the respondents think about the subject at hand. Over the next two years an online research platform was
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