Taking the temperature of the Australian market research industry — the client perspective. Q4, 2025

Last quarter, we published our first ‘research on research’ article about the future of the research industry as told from the perspective of people working in research agencies.

At the time, just three months ago, the industry mood appeared muted. Sales were slow, competition fierce and their feelings about AI-enabled technologies thorny.

In this article, I address the all-important buyer or ‘client-side’ perspective. I wanted to understand if the major shifts we’re seeing in the industry — the rise of DIY tools, AI etc — were translating into material decisions by the organisations who hold the purse strings.

So I sat down with six client-side researchers, often over coffee or lunch, to understand how their work is changing.

For obvious reasons, I will not name them or the organisations they work for. But I can say that all work for recognisable brands spanning the FMCG, retail, financial and business services industries. 

Most of these researchers began their careers working in agencies before making the switch to client-side, a valuable viewpoint for those of us who have never made that leap.

Thanks kindly to those people who took time out of their day to speak with me.

Here are the findings.

Tight research budgets and ‘doing more with less’

I began my conversation by asking how life as an insights professional has changed over the past year or so. And it’s clear that change — positive and negative — is afoot.

Just as some agencies reported softer demand earlier this year, most client-side researchers said their budgets were under pressure or that they were expected “to do more with less”.

“The industry is condensing,” said one insights manager who lamented the reduction of their department headcount and couldn’t see it being restored any time soon. Another respondent recently left their employer due to a “lack of funds and budget”. A third reported they were “barely doing an insight job in a traditional sense anymore” due to dwindling budgets — instead they pored over secondary data in search of insight.

“The industry is condensing. “I’m never going to have the team I did in the past.”

What might explain this apparent contraction? One respondent pointed to the growth of CX, UX and data science functions in their business which were better at navigating the ‘say-do’ gap and limited the need for traditional research.

This perspective tallies with the words of the venerable Ray Poynter and Australian researcher Garreth Chandler who at a recent Research Society trends webinar told a sobered audience, “the walls around our industry are breaking down.” The rise of AI, data science and ResTech means valuable information is flowing from disparate places. It needn’t be harvested and packaged in the ‘insights department’ just because it bore the name.

But not all insights departments speak of tougher times.

An FMCG insights manager whose organisation runs 56 projects a year said the tempo and frequency of work had simply shifted. Before it was “big, bulky $40-$60K projects” with long gestation periods. Now it’s about smaller, faster and more cost-effective projects made possible by ResTech and a more proactive approach to insights.

“Things have shifted quite a bit. We’re not doing as many big, bulky $40-60K projects anymore.”

This organisation was getting “smarter” with their budgets by spending less on routine work like brand tracking thanks to players like Tracksuit, and allocating more resources to strategic, blue-sky projects that might actually unlock new opportunities.

The rapid adoption of DIY Research Technology (aka ‘ResTech’), ‘good enough research’ and ‘no research research’

In 2023 global spend on research software exceeded ‘market research’ spend for the first time. Source: ESOMAR Global Market Research 2024 trends report

The impact of ResTech on these research departments is plain to see: Askable for quick turn-around qual; Ideally for iterative concept development; Tracksuit for brand tracking; Glow for quant. All self-serve and fast.

While the adoption of DIY tools is striking, feelings towards them are mixed. “It’s a false economy,” said a highly experienced quantitative researcher who found themselves “scripting for the first time in my life” on a DIY platform. Another said many of these “new toys” are often used as a means for insights managers to “check their own homework” – sexy, fast and cheap but low on insight.

Quality issues are also fraught, and some insights managers are noticing: survey fraud, bot farms and professional respondents. Who is answering all these pesky questions for such little money? And what happens when the person running the study within the client organisation isn’t research literate and asks the ‘wrong’ questions to begin with? Furthermore, with more agentic AI capabilities being integrated into these ResTech services everyday (such as automated reporting and moderation) won’t the insights become “blancmange”, as one respondent put it? That is, predictable, unoriginal and lacking the authenticity that demands action?

But then again, for some applications it’s hard to argue with cheap and fast. If we take something like brand tracking — which one respondent called “the most boring thing in life” and I chuckled — hundreds of thousands of dollars can potentially be saved by switching to a low-cost ResTech provider. And while the data might not be perfect or comprehensive, it’s probably “good enough” for the organisation’s purposes.

This idea of “good enough research” became a theme in my conversations. Ad testing, brand tracking, ‘should the pack be blue or orange?’ There is a laundry list of research briefs where it’s hard to defend traditional research methods and their price points in the face of faster, cheaper ResTech alternatives because the value of these insights isn’t so consequential to begin with. Ad testing, for example, in many instances is the equivalent of an insurance policy. Not a game-making opportunity, just a ‘disaster check’.

This idea of traditional research (“big, bulky, expensive and slow”) versus the new world of research (“nimble, fast, cheap and iterative”) was addressed head-on in the aforementioned industry trends webinar delivered to  Research Society members where a slide titled ‘6 ugly truths for market researchers’ informed us, among other things, that ‘Speed and cost expectations have changed permanently - value points are eroded’ and that ‘the traditional way of doing both qual and quant remain too slow to be viable.’ And clients are speeding up their processes too. One respondent said their organisation had reduced new product launch lead times from six months down to eight weeks. This, of course, necessitates faster insights.

“The traditional way of doing both qual and quant remain too slow to be viable.”

Another idea Ray Poynter brought to my attention was the concept of ‘No Research, Research’ which refers to the power of AI tools like Google’s ‘deep research’ function being able to generate viable answers without the need for custom research at all, ResTech or traditional. I floated this possibility with most of my interviewees but none seemed to have utilised these capabilities in this way just yet. This said, one respondent was flabbergasted when their insights team commissioned an $80K consumer trends project only for it to return the same answers that were known to the business all along. “Sometimes, people have to pay for the research to believe it”, they said.

Client perceptions of Australian research agencies: stiff competition, the merits of big vs. little — and ‘a bit of panic’

On their perceptions of research agencies operating in Australia, the general consensus is that agency land is still “same, same”. Some agencies have expanded, others have contracted, but their offerings remain mostly undifferentiated.

One respondent characterised the current industry mood as “a bit panicky” as agencies jostle and re-augment their offer to include AI capabilities and defend their value to the market. Another respondent said research agencies are “all upping their game” due to growing competition before adding, “I don’t meet with new agencies anymore. I have an excellent panel. I can’t justify it.”

Their pain points with traditional research agencies are unsurprising: sitting through mind-numbingly boring 100-page PowerPoint presentations, inflexible costings, the senior account manager disappearing while the wet-behind-the-ears junior who doesn’t quite understand the difference between monadic and sequential monadic struggles through the project unaided.

On the matter of large, established agencies versus boutique and independent, these insights managers have different feelings. Referring to depressed research budgets of late, one respondent said “When there’s less bites of the cherry, it’s the smaller guys that get hit the worst”. In the same vein, another respondent worried what would happen to their projects if their independent researcher’s “plane went down”, so to speak. Going small and independent still constitutes something of a risk.

“When there’s less bites of the cherry, it’s the smaller guys that get hit the worst.”

But not everyone has this view. A respondent whose organisation regularly commissions insights projects externally said they had moved away from big agencies due to “quality issues” and towards “smaller agencies and independent researchers with good reputations.” Another is always interested in engaging with new suppliers provided they have something different to bring to the table.

Artificial intelligence, the next generation of researchers and work-life balance

One issue that came up without my willing it to was the issue of training the next generation of researchers. “There’s not as many good researchers coming up through the ranks” a highly experienced quant researcher told me. They continued, “There was no training programme for juniors when I left [major insight company], so who is training juniors??”

“There’s not as many good researchers coming up through the ranks”

Another insights manager who likes AI capabilities to be an “extension of my team” able to do tasks that previously would have been assigned to juniors said, “My worry with AI is that there isn’t a training ground for young researchers any more. I was lucky. I got trained properly.”

Their concerns are valid. Who is going to drive all these AI-fuelled ResTech-powered research projects in the future? Most commercial air travel is automated these days, but I damn well hope the pilot knows what they're doing when we run into turbulence.

But “hopefully” the efficiencies brought by AI will mean “agency employees can go home on time”. The long hours these client-side researchers previously dedicated in the engine rooms of agencies have not been forgotten. “Leaving the office before 10.30 p.m. was a good day” said one respondent reflecting on life at their former agency. Receiving emails at unsociable hours from overworked employees is still happening today, some tell me, and acts as a deterrent from entertaining the possibility of an agency-side role again.

“At my old agency, leaving before 10.30pm was a good day.”

Is the traditional agency model dead?

I concluded my discussion with this deliberately provocative question. “Kind of” says one FMCG researcher. “Not dead, but playing less of a role” says another. So I phrased the question a little differently: “Will there be more or less research agencies in five years from now?”

“Definitely less” says a respondent swiftly and then added, “It’s going to be really interesting how the big agencies justify that value for money piece into the future.”