The Marketing Research and Insight Excellence Awards winner MESH Experience
Editor’s note: MESH Experience is the winner of the 2022 Marketing Research Supplier of the Year (2021 revenue below $10 million) Award which is a category in the Marketing Research and Insight Excellence Awards. To find out more about the awards click here.
MESH Experience was founded on an innovative concept – capturing the whole customer experience – but following a tough pandemic, the team re-grouped and invested in its growth plan, putting it on track to deliver over 42% revenue growth 2022 vs. 2021. Collaboration – through client, partner and team experiences – is fundamental. The company demonstrated its agility when it began pivoting to offer weekly insight to banks during the pandemic free of charge. An award-winning, diverse-owned business, MESH launched a diverse-owned insight consultancy network, Diversity Unlimited, in June 2022.
What is the overall goal when taking on a client?
Our goal in taking on a new client is simply to help them achieve their goals. It sounds intuitive, but we are focused on helping clients think beyond a research project and instead to think about brand and strategy goals and growth and how each insight and learning will build toward these. For example, when we started working with Fidelity International five years ago, we wanted to help Jet Cooke, marketing director at Fidelity, to embed her new strategy through providing the campaign evaluation data to keep the company aligned. She grew revenue +350%. A client’s success is our success. Most of us have “experience” in our job titles and this is to remind us that our partnership and the experience we have as a team is paramount. In providing marketing effectiveness solutions, we like to go on a marketing road trip together, to be there at each twist and turn of the journey as we help our client achieve their goals.
What, in your opinion, is the most important thing for a supplier to provide to an end-client?
A dynamite team. A team with the expertise and attitude to quickly respond to the client, whatever situation they are facing. One that is accountable, responsible, flexible and strategic. The supplier should be a partner that can bring solutions and share in the journey the client is taking. Just as CMO’s need to be “connectors” bringing different specialists together, a good insight supplier should be able to bring the right specialists together, whether these are from inside the supplier organization or through collaborating with other outside specialists.
MESH has launched Crater Lake & Co. to help clients create a clear performance narrative with their measurement. MESH is the measurement partner, Navigation ME is the modeling partner, Brian Jacobs is the media strategist and Hilary Woods is the creative strategist. Clients can tap into these specialists as and when they need to.
In June we also set up Diversity Unlimited, a collective of award-winning, diverse-owned, insight consultancies as a one-stop-shop for corporates. Any of these suppliers can easily harness others to build a best-in-class solution for their client.
Where do you see market research in five years?
In five years, we will see market research being a highly valued and integral part of a client’s ecosystem – the perfect complement to big data, a way to understand the “why,” and to fill data gaps and deserts that currently exist, in spite of having more availability and access to data than ever before.
With people’s attention spans declining and the customer experience increasing in importance, there will be more chief insight officers on the boards of companies.
Automation will play an increasing role in delivering survey data. However, there will also be a premium on the interpretation of data and the communication of this through compelling narratives that get actioned.
We also foresee an industry with even more specialisms! With the growth of research tech and AI and new tools to measure attention and emotion, we are already seeing the industry transform out of all recognition from traditional quantitative and qualitative research. We see this trend growing.