MarketResearch.com has acquired the Thomson Business Intelligence (TBI) Market Research service, known as Profound. Thomson announced earlier this year that they wanted to sell Profound.
According to the press release “the acquisition expands MarketResearch.com’s international reach with additional content and sales presence in Europe and North America. Profound provides a closed-platform, market research service that complements MarketResearch.com’s open-format, web-based service.” It will be interesting to see what pricing model they adopt for it and how, if at all, they integrate Profound with their existing service. MarketResearch.com bought rival company MindBranch in 2005 but the two sites remain. I suspect that, given the different type of users the services have, Profound will be marketed as a separate product.
I am a current user of the Profound service, and have been for a few years. The main benefit of Profound is the ability to download individual chapters, or tables for a fraction of the cost of the whole report. However, increasingly, I have noticed that more and more reports are available to download as the entire report. This is moving towards the http://www.marketresearch.com model – slowly taking more cash for less service!!
I am also the co-developer of http://www.free-research.com a website that provides over 5,000 free market, company and country reports. I have, in fact, asked Karen to review our site. Karen -please take a moment to review our site. Our users include Economist Intelligence Unit, UBS, Egon Zehnder, Lloyds TSB, Bureau Veritas, Norwich Union, Credit Suisse, Baker Mackenzie, Nielsen, Dow Europe, IRN Research, CMS Cameron McKenna, Kaupthing, Commerzbank, Rhodia, Post Office, Mars Inc, Qinetiq, NM Rothschild, HM Treasury, Arthur D Little, Cushman & Wakefield, BDO Stoy Hayward, Warburg Pincus, Freepint, University of Edinburgh and hundreds more. We would appreciate your and other users feedback….