Future of Research

The rapidly changing digital landscape is disrupting the status quo for market research. Cambiar Consulting’s 2012 Future of Research study identified that the market leader of the future will not be a traditional market research firm. Market research clients expect actionable information from their market research data, delivered to them using creative techniques, data synthesis and analytics, under much shorter timeframes. They are looking to collaborate with their market research partners and to rethink the market research process. They understand social media use and are demanding new ways to reach market research participants, with higher rates of brand engagement. More than US$23B of this industry is moving to new generation tools and services to support real-time conversational-style marketing required to engage the always connected consumer. These are the conditions under which SociaLabra was founded in 2012.

SociaLabra began by commercializing previously developed community management technology conceived at a Canadian business school that focused on private social networks and analytics. In a laboratory-like style, SociaLabra deployed 22 niche communities with more than 22,175 user accounts on its social platform, enabling analysis of behaviour and social apps usage.

In 2013, SociaLabra identified customer intelligence as a growth area, the result of helping a customer build one of the largest female social media ad networks in Canada using SociaLabra community software. In 2014, SociaLabra acquired the global rights to new content engagement and sharing technology used by thousands of authors, which, together with its community management software, are being used to launch Market Research Cloud™ (“MRC”), the industry’s next generation, enterprise-grade online market research service.