12 Best Brand Tracking Software Tools for 2025 (by Category)
Brand tracking software generally falls into two broad categories:
- Survey-focused platforms, which are ideal for collecting structured, quantitative data directly from your target audience to help you measure brand awareness, track perception over time, and more.
- Brand monitoring software, which specializes in tracking online mentions of your brand across social media platforms, news outlets, forums, review sites, and more.
In this post, we cover the following survey-based brand tracking software:
- Pollfish: Our survey-focused brand tracking software offering transparent pay-per-response pricing, quick turnaround time, and high-quality data. Well-suited for companies of all sizes, from small and medium businesses to large enterprises.
- Qualtrics: A survey platform whose pricing may be cost-prohibitive for smaller and medium-sized companies due to high monthly fees.
- Tracksuit: Measures brand health using recurring surveys and simple visual dashboards.
- Quantilope: A market research platform offering various research tools, including surveys.
- Latana: A research platform focused on non-incentivized surveys and large sample sizes.
- Kantar: Offers a suite of brand guidance and research tools and services.
- Attest: A consumer research platform offering multi-market surveys and brand tracking dashboards.
And then we cover the following monitoring-based brand tracking software:
- Brandwatch: A social listening platform with a built-in influencer marketing solution.
- Meltwater: Well-established reputation management tool for tracking mentions across different types of media.
- Awario: Offers brand management and sentiment analysis.
- Brand24: Monitors social media mentions and tracks metrics using AI.
- Ahrefs: An SEO platform that can be used to track branded search terms, backlinks, and visibility across the web.
1. Pollfish: DIY Survey Platform for Brand Tracking
Pollfish is a DIY survey platform used by companies of all sizes for a variety of research needs, with brand tracking being one of the most popular.
You can choose from pre-built brand research templates like Brand Awareness, Brand Diagnostic, Brand Perceptions, and CPG Brand Awareness & Perceptions, or create your own survey from scratch.
While the platform is easy to use, it also offers powerful features that let you customize every part of your survey to match your research goals.
In this section, we’ll cover:
- How to use Pollfish, from designing your survey to selecting your target audience and analyzing results.
- Pollfish’s first-party respondent communities, which provide higher-quality audiences and more reliable data.
- Our transparent, pay-per-response pricing model that’s more affordable and upfront than traditional subscriptions.
- Pollfish’s fast turnaround times, just a few hours for general audiences, or a few days for more niche segments.
- Complimentary support from seasoned market researchers to guide you on survey design, targeting, and analysis.
Let’s dive in.
How to Use Pollfish’s Brand Tracking Software in 3 Easy Steps
- Build your brand tracking survey: Start with one of our brand research templates or create a custom survey from scratch.
- Choose your target audience: Pollfish offers flexible audience targeting, so you can either reach general populations or highly specific groups based on your research goals.
- Review and analyze your results: View your survey data directly in the Pollfish platform. You can filter responses, compare segments, and create custom charts in your brand’s colors, all without needing to export to Excel.
Below, we’ll look at each of these in more detail.
Step 1: Design Your Survey
❇️ Brand Tracking Templates
Pollfish offers brand tracking templates built by research experts, so you don’t have to start from zero.
Benefits of using Pollfish’s templates include:
- Save time by starting with professionally written, customizable questions.
- Follow market research best practices to ensure clean, reliable data.
- Maintain consistency across surveys to track brand changes over time.
- Reduce setup errors with built-in logic and structure.
- Get results faster by minimizing survey design work upfront.
Popular templates include:
- Brand Awareness: Measure how many people have heard of your brand.
- Brand Perception: Understand how your brand is viewed by consumers.
- Brand Diagnostic: Assess overall brand health at a specific point in time.
- CPG Brand Awareness & Perceptions: Track familiarity and perception of Consumer Packaged Goods (CPG) brands.
❇️ 16 Question Types
Pollfish offers 16 different question formats to choose from, including multiple choice, open-ended, NPS, MaxDiff, A/B tests, and more, giving you the flexibility to design surveys that match your research needs.
Read the full list of question types here.
❇️ Advanced Questionnaire Design Features
Pollfish has a variety of advanced features that help you collect clean, unbiased data and tailor the survey experience for each respondent. Let’s take a look at some that you may want to use in your brand tracking surveys:
1. Skip Logic Branching
Guide participants through different paths in your survey based on how they respond to earlier questions.
- Example: Ask “Which type of skincare products have you purchased in the last month?” If they select “Moisturizers,” they’re shown questions tailored to that category. If they choose “Acne treatments,” they’re routed to a different set of questions focused on that product type. This ensures each respondent gets a relevant experience, and your data reflects meaningful subgroup insights.
2. Shuffle Answers
Randomize the order of answer choices to prevent order bias.
- Example: When asking respondents to choose their favorite athletic shoe brand, some may unconsciously choose the first option if the list is always presented in the same order. Shuffling the choices ensures that no brand is unfairly favored by its position.
3. Randomize Questions
Change the order in which questions are shown to different respondents.
- Example: If your survey includes 10 brand attribute questions, randomizing them can help reduce response patterns or fatigue, especially if someone tends to rush through later questions.
4. Screening Questions
Filter out participants who don’t meet specific criteria before they enter the main portion of the survey.
- Example: If someone selects “I’ve never heard of this brand,” then they won’t be able to proceed with the survey.
5. “Other” and “None of the Above” Options
Quickly add these common answer choices to relevant questions with one click.
- Example: When asking, “Which of the following brands have you heard of?” including “Other” and “None of the above” helps you capture more complete and accurate responses without needing to add those options to every question manually.
Note: This is just a small sampling — explore the full list of survey design capabilities here.
Step 2: Select Your Target Audience
Pollfish gives you access to a broad and diverse set of respondents through our first-party network (through parent company Prodege), with tools to help you precisely define your ideal audience.
❇️ 50+ Audience Filters Across 6 Categories
Target respondents via 50 filters in six categories, including Demographics, Geographic Criteria, Consumer Lifestyle, Employment & Occupation, Behavioral Data, and Media.
For example, you can survey urban professionals aged 30 to 45 who read digital news daily, work in tech or finance, and regularly dine out at least three times a week.
❇️ Target Specific Shoppers
Refine your audience to include consumers who’ve purchased specific brands or visited particular stores, based on verified receipt data.
For example, instead of targeting all athletic shoe buyers, you can narrow your audience to people who’ve recently purchased from Nike, Adidas, or New Balance, or who regularly shop at retailers like Dick’s Sporting Goods or Foot Locker. (Later on, we cover in more detail how we verify that they’ve actually made these purchases.)
❇️ Set Audience Quotas
Ensure a balanced sample by setting quotas on attributes like age, gender, income, etc.
For example, if you want to compare perceptions across income groups, you can set quotas to ensure one-third of your sample earns under $50K, one-third earns $50 to 100K, and one-third earns over $100K.
That’s only scratching the surface of what you can do with Pollfish targeting, but you can view the full video demonstration here.
Step 3: Analyze the Results
Once responses start coming in, Pollfish gives you a range of tools to explore, filter, and share your findings. There’s no need to export data to external platforms unless you want to.
❇️ Visualize Results Instantly
You can view your survey result data in real time without waiting for a post-survey download. Results are automatically displayed as color-coded charts, graphs, and tables, making it easy to understand trends at a glance.
❇️ Filter by Segment or Response
Pollfish lets you break down your data by specific audience segments or individual responses.
For example, if you want to see how Gen Z respondents rated your brand versus Gen X, you can isolate that group and instantly update your visuals. You can also filter by specific answer choices: for instance, viewing only those who selected “highly likely to purchase.”
❇️ Analyze Multiple Variables at Once
You can layer multiple filters to uncover deeper insights without needing to export your data.
Let’s say you want to compare brand perception among women aged 35 to 44 who live in urban areas and earn over $75K annually. You can easily set those filters and see the exact results for that audience. The platform will automatically update your charts so you can compare across segments without additional setup.
❇️ Match Charts to Your Brand Colors
Pollfish allows you to customize the look and feel of your charts by applying your brand’s color palette. This helps ensure that your reports feel consistent with your company’s visual identity, which is especially important when sharing insights with stakeholders, presenting to clients, or incorporating charts into larger brand deliverables.
❇️ Statistical Testing
Pollfish includes built-in stat testing so you can validate whether observed differences in your data are meaningful.
Suppose 82% of respondents aged 25 to 34 recognize your brand, compared to 68% of respondents aged 45 to 54. Pollfish can automatically test this difference for statistical significance and highlight the results within your charts. No need to use manual tests or export to another tool.
❇️ Build Presentations in the Platform
Pollfish lets you start building your presentation as soon as responses begin to roll in, so you don’t have to wait until the survey is complete. You can organize insights, add visualizations, and begin shaping your narrative while data is still being collected. Once you're ready to finalize, export everything into an editable PowerPoint file to polish and share with your team.
❇️ Export Your Data
You can download your results as a PDF, Excel file, SPSS dataset, or crosstabs, depending on your workflow. This flexibility makes it easy to bring your data into whatever tool your team uses for deeper analysis or final reporting.
These are only some of the analysis tools built into the Pollfish platform.
Pollfish’s High Audience Data Quality
For brand tracking to be meaningful, you need accurate, thoughtful responses from real people, not rushed answers from disengaged panelists or fraudulent bots. Here’s how Pollfish approaches audience sourcing and quality control.
❇️ Sourced from a Verified First-Party Network
Pollfish operates through a proprietary respondent network built and maintained by our parent company, Prodege. Unlike platforms that rely on third-party panel aggregators, our audience comes from a trusted ecosystem where respondents engage in real-world activities, such as uploading receipts, shopping online, playing games, or completing microtasks. These behavioral touchpoints create a built-in safeguard against bots and fake users.
As one of our customers shared on Trustpilot: "The most important point to make is that I trust the responses of my survey. My target audience was very specific and I could tell that the responses were legitimately coming [from] subjects in my target audience.”
❇️ Respondents Opt In, Not Burn Out
Pollfish respondents aren’t bombarded with constant survey invites. Instead, they choose when to participate. This opt-in model attracts more thoughtful and attentive participants, which is essential when measuring nuanced brand perceptions over time.
❇️ 14-Day Evaluation Before the First Question
Before new panelists ever see a live survey, they go through a 14-day onboarding phase where they complete internal profiling surveys. Only those who demonstrate consistent, high-quality participation are invited into the active respondent pool, so your brand tracking survey data is built on a solid foundation from the start.
❇️ Fraud Prevention Built into Every Survey
Pollfish applies multiple layers of quality control to each response. This includes:
- Unique user IDs to block duplicates
- Attention checks and trap questions
- Speeding detection and gibberish filtering
- Anti-VPN and device fingerprinting
- Straight-lining detection
- Human oversight for each and every manual response
❇️ Trust Scores That Promote Better Behavior
Every respondent is assigned a dynamic trust score based on their response patterns and long-term behavior. Higher scores unlock more opportunities within the Prodege ecosystem, creating a real incentive for thoughtful, honest participation.
Like one of our customers noted on Trustpilot:
“Each time I use this service I am blown away by the speed with which the responses come in and with the detail which most of them include. You can tell that the respondents take this very seriously. They must really enjoy doing it.”
Note: These are just some of the ways that we ensure your brand tracking insights are based on clean, reliable data. Learn more here.
Pay-per-Response Pricing That Scales with Your Needs
Pollfish uses a usage-based pricing model that starts at just $0.95 per completed response, making it easy to scale your brand tracking efforts up or down depending on your goals and budget.
❇️ No Subscriptions, No Commitments
You’re never locked into a long-term plan or paying for unused response quotas. Whether you're launching a single brand tracking survey or running them on a recurring basis, you only pay for what you use.
As noted on Trustpilot by a Pollfish customer, “They charge based on the completed response. It is very fair and transparent. As a researcher, I have used many survey platforms, but they are the best so far.”
❇️ Unlimited Team Members Included
Collaborate freely across all departments at no extra cost. Pollfish allows unlimited users under one account, unlike other platforms that charge per seat.
Transparent Pricing with No Surprises
Pollfish makes it easy to understand exactly what you’re paying before you ever launch your survey.
❇️ No Hidden Fees
Your total cost is calculated based on the number of responses and any targeting filters you apply. There are no added charges behind the scenes.
As two of our customers shared on Trustpilot:
“The dollar amount they quote you in their cost calculator tool, and the number they show when you're developing the survey, is the number you pay. I was burned multiple times by SurveyMonkey charging me unexpected amounts and making it difficult to quit an expensive subscription. I'm so happy to have found Pollfish as an alternative. Their support team also responds VERY quickly to chat messages and has been tremendously helpful the few times I had questions.”
“The pricing is clear and transparent from the beginning. The results come quickly and can be downloaded in different formats and with different filters. What we like most is the ability to filter the results and analyze them separately for each segment. We highly recommend this platform.”
❇️ Full Price Transparency
As you build your survey and apply targeting filters, your total cost is clearly displayed in real time in the upper right-hand area.
For example:
- Base cost per response: $0.95
- Add targeting for household income over $150K: +$0.55
- Add targeting for respondents who shop at premium grocery stores: +$0.55
- Final cost per response: $2.05
Need 800 responses for your brand tracking survey? You’ll pay exactly $1,640, visibly displayed upfront — no surprises, no hidden fees.
This level of clarity makes budgeting for brand tracking surveys simple and predictable.
Fast Turnaround Time From a Few Hours to a Few Days
When you're tracking brand performance, timing matters. Pollfish helps you get results quickly, so you can take action without delay.
❇️ General Population Surveys Typically Come Back Within a Few Hours
If your brand tracking survey targets a broad audience, like adults in the U.S., smartphone users, or pet owners, you can often collect hundreds of responses within just a few hours. This makes it easy to monitor shifts in awareness or perception shortly after a product launch, PR event, or ad campaign.
Like our customers have pointed out on Trustpilot:
"The thing that amazes me most is how quickly you can get your data results back. So fast! Usually in a couple of hours."
“I needed a 25 question survey answered, and was able to get 500 completed surveys in 8 hours with Pollfish. The presentation of the results is very impressive and the demographics information Pollfish provided is invaluable.”
“I honestly thought the results would take days, and I was starting to get worried because I was using Pollfish for a quarterly goal and I was trying to make it before the deadline. However, I received the results in literally just a few hours!”
– Read the full review here
“Much more affordable than all the alternatives I found, and I had all my results ready within just a couple of hours.”
❇️ Niche or Highly Targeted Audience Surveys Usually Take a Few Days
If you’re targeting a more specific segment, such as high-income earners who buy from premium skincare brands, or Gen Z consumers in urban areas with a strong interest in sustainability, it may take a few days to complete. That’s because these groups are smaller and more defined, but Pollfish still delivers faster results than most other platforms in the same category.
Our customers have pointed out how quickly results come back in Trustpilot reviews:
“I'm amazed at how quickly the platform was able to deliver rich, segmentable data from over 500 respondents. I had feature-ready insights in only 3 days.”
“I've used Pollfish before so when I needed to test concepts for a new business pitch in 5 countries over the holiday, I turned to Pollfish. The surveys were easy to set up, allowed me to select my very specific target and launched right away. Within a couple of days I had my results in an easy to interpret, actionable format well within my budget.”
Complimentary Advanced Support from Brand Tracking Research Experts
Designing a great brand tracking survey isn’t always straightforward, especially if you’re new to market research or juggling multiple priorities. That’s why Pollfish offers free, on-demand support from seasoned market research experts who know the ins and outs of survey design, audience targeting, and data analysis.
❇️ Free 24/7 Support (Yes, Really)
Our support team is available 24/7 via live chat with no additional fees and no hidden limitations. And unlike platforms that rely on scripted chatbot responses, you’ll speak with real people who understand research.
Take it from one of our customers:
“The customer support agents were awesome. They responded to every question I had in a timely manner. (And before we even paid a cent!)”
❇️Help When You Need It, At Any Experience Level
Whether you’re launching your first brand equity survey or are an experienced market researcher seeking a second set of eyes, our team can help you choose the right approach, validate your targeting criteria, or sanity-check your questionnaire.
As noted by several Pollfish customers:
“The customer service I received was fantastic. Brilliant guidance that helped get high-quality results. I was really pleased with the outcome and highly recommend using them.”
“The customer service team is super responsive too for those more complex enquiries about the tool and criteria. All in all this experience has been way easier (and cheaper) than any other 'big players' out there”
“I love this product. I feel like it gives me enterprise grade market survey tech at a consumer price. Highly recommend. I love how responsive the customer support team is.”
Get Started with Pollfish
Ready to start running brand tracking surveys? Pollfish makes it easy to get started.
You have three flexible options:
- Create a free account: Explore the platform and start building your brand tracking survey at your own pace. No credit card required.
- Schedule a demo walkthrough: Get a guided walkthrough tailored to your brand tracking goals.
- Inquire about full-service brand research through our parent company Prodege: Prefer to hand it off? Our in-house research team can manage everything for you from survey design to audience selection, data analysis, and a final report customized to your objectives.
2. Qualtrics
Qualtrics is best suited for large enterprises that need brand tracking survey capabilities. It’s often priced out of reach for smaller teams. We discuss what differentiates Pollfish in our article on the best alternatives to Qualtrics.
Key Features
- Enterprise-grade customer survey tools with omnichannel distribution (email, SMS, digital, post-call, and more)
- AI-powered text and sentiment analysis
- Dozens of pre-built, expert-designed survey templates
- Custom dashboards and reports tailored to specific teams or roles
- Automated closed-loop customer feedback and ticketing workflows
- Real-time customer journey insights and VoC data routing
- Integrations with ticketing systems and CRM platforms
3. Tracksuit
Tracksuit is a brand tracking survey platform that’s great for marketing teams that want to track awareness, consideration, and preferences with an intuitive dashboard that’s easy to share and present.
Key Features
- Always-on tracking of brand awareness, consideration, and preference
- Visual dashboards showing performance across the full brand funnel
- Segment-level actionable insights by gender, region, and age
- Competitive benchmarking across messaging, values, and perception
- Timeline views to track brand growth and campaign impact over time
- Surveys managed by Tracksuit’s in-house research team
4. Quantilope
Quantilope is another tool that can help you run brand tracking surveys. It combines advanced methodologies like MaxDiff and conjoint analysis with automation and AI tools to streamline complex studies from setup to reporting.
Key Features
- 15 fully automated advanced research methods, including MaxDiff, TURF, and conjoint
- AI-powered co-pilot (quinn) to guide survey creation and analysis
- Drag-and-drop survey builder with pre-built templates
- Real-time data collection and analysis
- Automated tracking studies with flexible time-based filters
- Exportable dashboards and PowerPoint reports with statistical testing
- Integrated insights repository for long-term knowledge management
5. Latana
Latana is another brand tracking platform that can help you measure brand awareness and perception at scale via surveys.
Key Features
- Access to non-panel respondents for more representative sampling
- Fully integrated solution from data collection to insight generation
- Monthly dashboard updates with segment tracking and automated significance testing
- Flexible modular setup for adding markets, switching packages, or running ad-hoc research
- Real-time, ad-based sampling and machine learning-powered QA
- Intuitive dashboard with error margins and trend visualizations
6. Kantar
Kantar combines robust brand tracking tools with global panel access and full-service consulting. It’s designed for enterprises that need both DIY flexibility and high-touch strategic support for equity measurement and forecasting.
Key Features
- Extensive brand tracking tools, including BrandDynamics, BrandEvaluator, and BrandSnapshot
- Access to 170M+ global respondents in 100+ markets
- Custom survey design and expert consultation services
- Device-agnostic survey experiences to improve data quality
- Award-winning programming tools and question component library
- Integrated dashboards and visualizations for reporting and insight sharing
- Enhanced data reliability with connected datasets and fraud prevention
7. Attest
Attest is a flexible, self-serve survey platform that’s great for brands that need fresh, ongoing consumer insights across multiple regions.
Key Features
- Always-on brand tracking to monitor awareness and perception over time
- Localized surveys with translations and regional targeting
- Flat audience cost with no hidden platform fees
- Side-by-side segment comparisons and crosstab insights
- Custom research capabilities tailored to brand KPIs
- Expert research support included at no extra cost
- Reach up to 150M+ people in 59 countries with surveys in 70+ languages
Next, we’ll take a look at five monitoring-based brand tracking software options.
8. Brandwatch
Brandwatch is a robust social intelligence platform built for marketers who need to understand how their brand is discussed across the digital landscape. It excels at social listening, trend analysis, and competitive benchmarking, making it ideal for teams focused on brand perception and engagement.
Key Features
- Real-time monitoring across social media, news, blogs, forums, and broadcast media
- AI-powered sentiment analysis and trend detection
- Historical data access for long-term brand studies
- Share of voice tracking to compare brand visibility
- Influencer identification and marketing campaigns measurement
- Custom dashboards for brand health metrics and messaging impact
- Seamless integration with MarTech stacks for reporting and brand strategy
9. Meltwater
Meltwater offers a comprehensive suite for media intelligence, combining digital and traditional media monitoring with PR analytics and social listening. It's well-suited for organizations managing brand reputation, measuring media impact, and aligning comms with marketing strategy.
Key Features
- Monitoring of brand mentions across online, print, broadcast, and social media
- Reputation tracking with sentiment and advanced analytics
- PR campaign performance measurement and media outreach tools
- 360° reporting to evaluate strategy impact across departments
- AI-powered actionable insights for trend spotting and decision-making
- Tools for influencer marketing and consumer intelligence
- Social media management and audience engagement capabilities
10. Awario
Awario specializes in real-time social media monitoring across platforms like Twitter, forums, blogs, and news sites. It's built for teams that need to stay on top of conversations as they happen and react quickly to brand mentions or sales opportunities.
Key Features
- Real-time tracking of brand mentions across the web
- Brand sentiment analysis to gauge public opinion
- Boolean search for precise, flexible keyword tracking
- Influencer identification and conversation reach scoring
- Lead generation through Awario Leads, surfacing competitor complaints and product inquiries
- Email alerts and white-label reporting for streamlined workflows
- Multi-language, location-based monitoring with mobile access
11. Brand24
Brand24 offers simple, AI-enhanced media monitoring that makes it easy for small teams to track brand mentions, analyze sentiment, and generate competitive reports. It’s a strong fit for businesses that want reliable brand insights without the complexity of enterprise tools.
Key Features
- Real-time media monitoring across social, news, blogs, and reviews
- AI-powered brand sentiment analysis and topic identification
- Share of voice, influence score, and reach metrics
- Automated alerts and anomaly detection
- Customizable, white-label reports for stakeholders
- AI Brand Assistant for insights, comparisons, and recommendations
- Clean workspace with filters, folders, and starred mentions
12. Ahrefs
Ahrefs is a powerful SEO and content marketing platform designed to help teams monitor branded search performance, competitor visibility, and overall digital presence. While not a traditional brand tracker, it excels at showing how your brand performs in organic search and link-building efforts.
Key Features
- Brand Radar tracks mentions across websites, AI platforms, and competitors
- Rank Tracker monitors branded keyword rankings and share of voice
- Site Explorer analyzes traffic, backlinks, and competitive visibility
- Content Explorer surfaces brand mentions across billions of indexed pages
- Alerts notify you of changes in backlinks, rankings, and brand presence
- SEO dashboards and reports consolidate marketing campaigns' performance data
- AI Content Grader and auditing tools optimize branded content at scale
Get Started with Pollfish
To begin using Pollfish:
- Create a free account
- Schedule a demo walkthrough
- Inquire about our full-service brand research through our parent company, Prodege
Top 20 Market Research Companies in 2025: Key Strengths
Top 20 Market Research Companies in 2025: Key Strengths
Market research companies come in many different types, but most can be broadly categorized into three main buckets:
- Full-Service Market Research Firms: These firms provide comprehensive, end-to-end market research services spanning quantitative methods like surveys to qualitative approaches such as focus groups and one-on-one interviews.
- Industry Intelligence & Custom Research Firms: In addition to offering full-service consulting and bespoke research, these companies also provide access to existing data, reports, studies, and industry insights they have previously compiled. Their industry expertise is a key differentiator.
- Self-Service Survey Platforms: These technology platforms allow businesses to conduct their own market research surveys, though many also offer supported or fully-managed services.
Even though these buckets are a helpful starting point, they aren’t mutually exclusive. Plus, within each bucket, each company will have its own unique strengths and specialties.
In this guide, we'll explore 20 top market research companies and what sets them apart in today’s competitive landscape. We'll start with our parent company, Prodege, and our DIY survey tool, Pollfish.
Here’s a high-level summary of each company’s key strengths:
- Prodege: As the largest single panel owner in the world, with over 100 million respondents across 125+ countries, Prodege (Pollfish’s parent company) is a full-service market research firm renowned for exceptional survey data quality. You can opt for an end-to-end service or select specific areas you need help with, including research design, survey programming, sample & fielding, data processing & analysis, reporting, and more.
- Pollfish: Our powerful DIY survey platform with rigorous data quality measures, a flexible and transparent pay-per-response pricing model, and a quick turnaround time from a few hours for general population audiences to a few days for more specialized niches. We offer robust questionnaire design, audience targeting, and data analysis capabilities that seasoned market researchers appreciate.
- Kantar: Best known for their brand tracking & brand equity measurement capabilities, although they offer a vast range of other market research services.
- Mintel: Offer consulting and on-demand databases & reports, including GNPD (Global New Product Database), where you can learn about 40,000+ new products launched across 86 markets and 46 CPG categories every month.
- Bixa: Market research firm specializing in Gen Z insights (although they also provide comprehensive research services across other demographics and markets).
- MRI-Simmons: Best known for their in-depth consumer data and national studies, particularly their MRI-Simmons USA study.
- Ipsos: Offer custom research and consulting across a wide variety of sectors, but best known as a leader in public opinion polling and political research.
- Nielsen: Best known for their TV rating & audience measurement capabilities.
- Suzy: Best known for their survey platform capabilities. Also offer a unique feature called Suzy Live, where you can run multi-person focus groups, 1-on-1 interviews, and in-home product testing.
- SG Analytics: While they offer a wide variety of solutions, as it pertains to market research, they provide full-service consulting (e.g., primary, secondary, quantitative, and qualitative market research).
- Gartner: Market research giant that's best known for their market research literature and analyses across various technology sectors.
- Forrester: Market research powerhouse that provides data across multiple industries, with a particular focus on technology vendors.
- IDC: Consulting firm that specializes in IT and tech research.
- Drive Research: Boutique market research agency that can help with a wide range of quantitative and qualitative research needs.
- Statista: Massive data aggregator, with insights, facts and stats across 170 industries and 150+ countries.
- IBISWorld: Best known for their wide range of industry research reports across 5,000+ industries.
- MarketResearch.com: Marketplace that boasts an extensive catalog of market research reports and analyses from a wide variety of sources.
- Attest: Best known for their survey platform capabilities. Can also help you run qualitative research.
- Qualtrics: A survey platform that’s best suited for enterprise companies.
- Remesh: Offers a unique approach to market research, where participants can respond and vote on each other’s answers.
Now that you have a high-level view of what each market research company excels at, we'll examine their capabilities in more detail.
1. Prodege (Pollfish’s Parent Company)
Prodege stands out as a company that combines full-service research capabilities with advanced technology.
Over time, Prodege has built and acquired a suite of market research tech platforms, notably Pollfish — our widely used survey tool ideal for companies conducting DIY research. (More details on Pollfish in the next section.)
Additionally, Prodege manages a vast network of audience panels and communities, boasting over 100 million respondents spanning more than 125 countries.
What Makes Prodege Unique: Survey data quality isn't just a priority for us — it's our foundation. We have a 40-person Panel Support, Security, and Compliance Department dedicated to this work every day.
We recently published The 3 Survey Data Quality Issues Sabotaging Your Research (& How We Fix Them) — an in-depth look at the stringent quality standards and processes we follow.
Our commitment to high data quality underpins every aspect of our offerings.
As it pertains to Prodege's full-service research offering, you can either opt for an end-to-end service (where we manage the entire survey process from start to finish) or pick specific areas where you need support, including:
- Research design
- Survey programming
- Sample & fielding
- Data processing & analysis
- Reporting
We also provide qualitative research services, including interviews, focus groups, and other methodologies.
Here's what Remesh had to say about working with us:
“Working with Prodege has allowed us to provide quality sample and a smooth recruitment process from beginning to end for our large-scale qual sessions. We can always count on the team for fast recruitment programming, excellent screening and quota delivery, low incidence rate audiences, and timely turnaround for all our projects. The customer service of their project management team is unmatched.”
You can also take advantage of our powerful data visualization tools that make it incredibly simple to slice and dice data and create complex charts using multiple variables:
As BuzzFeed have noted:
“Prodege has been a valuable asset in helping to prove BuzzFeed’s effectiveness. The quick turnaround of results within the Data Viz platform has allowed us to better service our advertising partners in delivering valuable campaign insights. The self-serve platform gives us the flexibility to format and export in a way that meets our specific needs. Prodege has even gone the extra mile and customized the PowerPoint slides to use our unique color scheme and layout.”
Interested in learning more about Prodege?
We invite you to:
2. Pollfish
Pollfish (our own product) is a powerful DIY survey platform with robust questionnaire design, audience targeting, and data analysis capabilities that seasoned market researchers appreciate.
Pollfish’s key benefits include:
- Rigorous data quality measures, which we explore in detail in our article on the data quality issues that can negatively impact your research.
As several customers shared on Trustpilot:
"The most important point to make is that I trust the responses of my survey. My target audience was very specific and I could tell that the responses were legitimately coming [from] subjects in my target audience.”
– Read the full review here“Each time I use this service I am blown away by the speed with which the responses come in and with the detail which most of them include. You can tell that the respondents take this very seriously. They must really enjoy doing it.”
– Read the full review here
- Flexible and transparent pay-per-response pricing model, starting at $0.95 per response, with no subscriptions, long-term commitments, or hidden surprise charges.
As several customers shared on Trustpilot:
“They charge based on the completed response. It is very fair and transparent. As a researcher, I have used many survey platforms, but they are the best so far.”
– Read the full review here“The dollar amount they quote you in their cost calculator tool, and the number they show when you're developing the survey, is the number you pay. I was burned multiple times by [competitor] charging me unexpected amounts and making it difficult to quit an expensive subscription. I'm so happy to have found Pollfish as an alternative. Their support team also responds VERY quickly to chat messages and has been tremendously helpful the few times I had questions.”
– Read the full review here“The pricing is clear and transparent from the beginning. The results come quickly and can be downloaded in different formats and with different filters. What we like most is the ability to filter the results and analyze them separately for each segment. We highly recommend this platform.”
– Read the full review here
- Industry leading turnaround time, from a few hours for general population audiences to a few days for more specialized niches. As several customers shared on Trustpilot:
Review for a general population survey:
“I needed a 25 question survey answered, and was able to get 500 completed surveys in 8 hours with Pollfish. The presentation of the results is very impressive and the demographics information Pollfish provided is invaluable.”
– Read the full review hereReview for a specialized niche:
“I'm amazed at how quickly the platform was able to deliver rich, segmentable data from over 500 respondents. I had feature-ready insights in only 3 days.”
– Read the full review here
In addition, Pollfish offers a feature called Conversational AI, which lets you have one-on-one conversations with respondents at scale, and gain unique qualitative insights. This is particularly useful for brand tracking (e.g., sentiment or perception), post-experience feedback, concept or creative testing, and more.
Interested in learning more about Pollfish?
- Create a free account, no credit card required.
- Schedule a demo call.
3. Kantar
Kantar is a global leader in brand measurement and consumer insights. They offer various solutions, including
- Brand tracking & brand equity measurement: This is their flagship offering, and what Kantar is best known for. Through BrandZ, they offer extensive reports on 4.5 million consumers across 22,000 brands, in 538 categories and 54 markets.
- Market research services: They can help with survey design & consultation, global panel management, data visualization & dashboards, data defense & fraud prevention, brand tracking, and much more.
- Consumer panel research through Worldpanel, which tracks purchase and usage behaviour data through the largest consumer panels in the world.
- Media effectiveness & audience measurement: According to their site, Kantar is an indispensable partner to 96 of the world’s 100 biggest advertisers.
- Innovation & product development: They offer solutions for idea screening, concept testing, package design screening & testing, and more.
4. Mintel
Mintel is a global leader in consumer market intelligence, offering various solutions, such as:
- On-demand databases and reports, including:
- Global New Products Database: Learn about 40,000+ new products launched across 86 markets and 46 CPG categories every month.
- Global Consumer Data: Learn about what consumers want across 36 markets generating 85% of the world's GDP.
- Market Dynamics: Connect the dots between market size data, consumer sentiment, and brand innovation.
- Consulting: They can help with primary research, social listening, predictive modeling, trends & foresight, competitive intelligence, mystery shopping, ideation workshops, and more.
- Competitive market intelligence: Delivered through a platform called Comperemedia, which is a company owned by Mintel.
- AI Tools: Includes Mintel Spark (an AI concept generator ideal for early innovation stages) and Mintel Leap (which provides instant answers from their extensive data libraries).
5. Bixa
Bixa is a market research firm specializing in Gen Z insights, though they also provide comprehensive research services across other demographics and markets.
Some of their key solutions include:
- Qualitative research services, including in-depth interviews, focus groups, ethnography and virtual ethnography, content analysis, video diary studies, mobile diary studies, subject matter expert interviews, UX audits and usability testing, and more.
- Quantitative research services, including surveys, experiments, data analytics, statistical modeling, market segmentation, trend analysis, forecasting, customer satisfaction measurement, and more.
- UX & product research services, uncovering the "why" behind user behaviors through user interviews, user testing, concept testing, CRO audits, video-based observational studies, and more.
- Market trend reports: Discover newly emerging trends via reports tailored to various industries, including fashion, technology, healthcare, and more.
6. MRI-Simmons
MRI-Simmons is best known for their in-depth consumer data and national studies, particularly their MRI-Simmons USA study (which merged the best elements of their legacy Survey of the American Consumer® study and Simmons’ National Consumer Study).
Diving deeper into some of their key solutions and offerings:
- MRI-Simmons USA study: MRI-Simmons states this is “the most comprehensive study on American consumers”, with reliable data on consumer attitudes, behaviors, media preferences, and more. It’s released each quarter, and they utilize address-based probabilistic sampling to ensure a nationally-representative sample.
- Catalyst Platform: A self-service tech platform that can help you generate clear, actionable insights based on MRI-Simmons' nationally representative consumer data.
- Local consumer insights, including their Market-by-Market Study, Local Flex Markets Study, and Local Market Report.
- Print measurement insights, including Magazine Media Brand Studies, Issue Specific Readership Study, and more.
- Studies on energetic technologies and cultural trends, including their Sports Fan Study, Podcast Study, Retail Trends Study, National Cannabis Study, LGBT & Gender Identity Study, Content Drivers Study, Trending Topics Study, Health & Wellness Study, Digital Life Study, Cord Evolution Study, Multi-Media Engagement Study, and more.
7. Ipsos
While Ipsos offers a wide variety of solutions, they're best known as a leader in public opinion polling. Diving deeper, some of their core solutions include:
- Public opinion polling & reports: While they regularly publish reports about a vast range of topics, they’re best known for their political polling reports.
- Innovation & Market Research: They can help companies seize market opportunities, test concepts, optimize pricing strategy, and more.
- Surveys: They can help you launch surveys via the Ipsos.Digital Platform, and connect you with pre-recruited respondents.
- Brand strategy: They can help you track your brand's performance against competitors.
- Customer Experience (CX) & Loyalty: They can help you measure customer satisfaction (e.g., Net Promoter Score) across the customer journey.
8. Nielsen
While Nielsen offers a wide variety of solutions, they’re best known for their TV rating & audience measurement capabilities. Diving deeper, some of their core solutions include:
- Audience measurement, including TV & streaming measurement, cross-media measurement, digital measurement, audio measurement, and more.
- Media planning, including audience segmentation, competitive intelligence, scenario planning, and more.
- Marketing optimization, including marketing outcomes and sports & games.
- Content metadata, including audio metadata, sports metadata, video metadata, and contextual video data.
- Datasets and reports across a vast range of industries.
9. Suzy
Suzy offers various solutions, including:
- Suzy Insights: Quantitative surveys, which is their flagship offering.
- Suzy Live: Qualitative insights, including multi-person focus groups, 1-on-1 interviews, and in-home product testing.
- Suzy Audiences: Iterative insights from the audiences that matter most to you.
- Suzy Speaks: AI-powered conversational surveys.
- Suzy Signals: Receive an email after each survey ends, which shows not just your results, but what to do next.
They also offer full-fledged managed services (geared for enterprise companies), which you can learn more about here.
10. SG Analytics
While SG Analytics offers a wide variety of solutions, in this section, we’ll focus specifically on their market research consulting offering.
They can help you with:
- Primary market research: Gain access to 4M+ B2B and B2C panelists across 75+ countries.
- Secondary market research: Their experienced researchers will analyze secondary data from internal and external sources.
- Quantitative market research with a focus on surveys.
- Qualitative market research: Focus groups, 1-on-1 interviews, etc.
They serve a wide variety of industries, including BFSI, Capital Market, TMT, and others.
Some of their market research solutions include market segmentation, product development, UAT studies, concept testing, competitor analysis, ad effectiveness, pricing strategy, customer satisfaction and experience, market entry strategies, brand awareness and positioning, and social and environmental studies.
11. Gartner
Gartner is a market research juggernaut that's best known for their market research literature and analyses across various technology sectors. Diving deeper, some of their key offerings include:
- Magic Quadrant™ Reports: Reports that shed light on 4 types of technology providers in fast growing markets: Leaders, Visionaries, Niche Players and Challengers.
- Hype Cycle™: Graphical representation of the maturity and adoption of emerging technologies, to help you identify how much risk is involved.
- And so much more: These are just some of Gartner’s more well-known offerings but they’re a powerhouse with a wealth of other market research information and use cases.
12. Forrester
Forrester is a market research powerhouse that offers consulting and provides data across multiple industries, with a particular focus on technology vendors.
Some of the key industries they serve include:
1. Technology
- Data
- Artificial Intelligence & Analytics
- Security & Risk
- Technology Architecture & Delivery
2. B2B
- Marketing
- Product
- Sales
3. Consumer
- Customer Experience
- Digital Business
- Marketing
13. IDC
IDC is a consulting firm that specializes in IT and tech research, with over 1,300 analysts worldwide in over 110 countries.
Some of the key industries they serve include:
- Energy
- Financial
- Government
- Health Manufacturing
- Retail
14. Drive Research
Drive Research is a full-service, boutique market research agency.
While you can explore their Services page for more details, here’s an overview of the key services they offer:
- Online surveys
- Customer surveys
- Employee surveys
- Qualitative recruiting
- Focus groups
- PR surveys
- Advanced analytics
Some of the key industries they serve include Consumer Goods, Financial Services, Higher Education, Manufacturing, Healthcare, Retail Travel and Tourism, and more.
15. Statista
Statista is a widely-known, massive data aggregator.
- They break down their insights into three categories:
- Market insights: Market forecast and KPIs for 1000+ markets in 190+ countries and territories.
- Consumer insights: Insights on consumer attitude and behavior based on 2,000,000+ interviews 15,000+ brands.
- eCommerce insights: Insights on 39,000+ online stores and marketplaces, with 70+ KPIs per store and revenue analytics and forecasts.
- Some of their more popular industry statistic categories are: consumer goods & FMCG, e-Commerce, economy & politics, energy & environment, internet, technology & telecommunications, transportation & logistics, and travel, tourism & hospitality.
- Statista also offers full-service market research, including target group analysis, pricing & product research, brand tracking, quick surveys, expert interviews, ad-hoc desk research, trend analysis, market sizes & forecasts, and other types of custom research.
16. IBISWorld
IBISWorld is best known for their wide range of industry research reports across 5,000+ industries. They were founded in 1971 and have 400+ employees in 6 offices globally: New York, Los Angeles, Melbourne, London, Frankfurt.
Some of their more popular industry report sectors include:
- Accommodation & Food Services
- Administration & Business Support Services
- Agriculture, Forestry, Fishing & Hunting
- Arts, Entertainment & Recreation
- Construction
- Educational Services
- Finance & Insurance
- Healthcare and Social Assistance
- Information Sector
- Manufacturing
- Mining
- Personal Services
- Professional, Scientific and Technical Service
- Public Administration & Safety
- Real Estate, Rental & Leasing
- Retail Trade
- Transportation and Warehousing
- Thematic Reports
- Utilities
- Wholesale Trade
17. MarketResearch.com
MarketResearch.com is best known for their extensive range of market research reports across various industries, including:
- Consumer Goods
- Food & Beverage
- Heavy Industry
- Service Industries
- Public Sector
- Life Sciences
- Technology & Media
- Marketing & Market Research
- Reports by Country
- Company Reports
18. Attest
Attest is best known for their survey platform capabilities, and you can browse their solutions by use case, including:
- Brand tracking
- Consumer profiling
- Market analysis
- New product development
- Multi-market research
- Creative testing
- Concept testing
- Campaign tracking
- Competitor analysis
- Quant & qual insights
- Seasonal research
19. Qualtrics
Qualtrics is best known for their survey platform capabilities. They’re well-suited for enterprise companies, and they categorize their features in 3 areas:
1. Customer Experience
- Voice of Customer
- Omnichannel Experience Management
- Digital Experience Analytics
- Website & App Feedback
- Location Experience Hub
- Online Reputation Management
- Contact Center Analytics
- Quality Management & Compliance
- Agent Coaching
- Edge Instant Insights
2. Employee Experience
- Employee Engagement
- Employee Pulse
- Employee Research
- Candidate Experience Management
- Employee Onboarding & Exit
- 360 Development Feedback
- Employee Retention Analytics
- Continuous Employee Listening
3. Strategy & Research
- Strategic Market Research
- Product Research
- Brand and Communication Research
- User Experience Research
- Edge Audiences
In addition to their DIY survey functionality, they also offer done-for-you market research services, which you can explore here.
20. Remesh
Remesh market research platform that has a unique offering:
- Participants can respond and vote on each other’s answers, and you can run online focus groups and surveys at scale, while receiving unique insights you might otherwise miss via traditional methods.
- Unique metrics like Percent Agree Scores give you more confidence in your insights.
- Automated data analysis tools save you time on manually reading verbatim responses, helping you create summaries and identify key themes in seconds.
- Bring your own audience or recruit on-platform: Remesh can supply you with high-quality, vetted participants, with an average sub-3% removal rate.
- Multiple service options: Beyond DIY research, Remesh also provides supported or fully managed services.
Interested in Learning More About Pollfish and Prodege?
We invite you to create a free Pollfish account (no credit card required) and/or book an introductory call.
8 Best Concept Testing Platforms (by Category)
8 Best Concept Testing Platforms (by Category)
When businesses search for concept testing platforms, they're typically looking for one of two main categories of tools:
Category #1: Concept Testing Survey Platforms
Survey-based concept testing platforms excel at delivering large-scale, statistically significant data. These platforms offer rapid results, often within hours to a few days, and let you maintain strict control over potential bias through careful questionnaire design. Top concept testing survey platforms include:
- Pollfish: Best for market researchers seeking high-quality survey data with transparent pay-per-response pricing. No subscription fees, annual commitments, or hidden costs. Well suited for companies of any size.
- Qualtrics: Best suited for large enterprise companies, and their pricing is often cost-prohibitive for small and medium-sized businesses.
- SurveyMonkey: Best for simpler survey requirements. While they offer pay-per-response pricing, essential features like skip logic require a subscription plan, increasing your total costs.
Category #2: Concept Testing Platforms Beyond Traditional Surveys
These platforms offer unique methodologies that can complement your survey data and reveal insights you might otherwise miss:
- MESH01: Specializes in concept testing for physical products where hands-on interaction is crucial. They handle recruiting qualified testers and collect comprehensive feedback through activity logs, surveys, image and video uploads, performance zone heatmaps, and real-time product usage data.
- System1: Offers innovative testing methodologies including a predictive trading game where participants buy or sell "shares" in concepts (providing market-like validation), FaceTrace technology that measures genuine emotional responses to visual concepts, and more.
- Highlight: Excels at in-home product testing across diverse use cases, from food and beverage tastings to packaging design validation. For example, they can ship package designs directly to consumers' homes and collect valuable real-world insights that complement your online survey data.
- Hotjar: Enables concept testing through two key features: concept testing questions while users browse your site (for example, after they've spent more than 45 seconds on a specific product page), and end-to-end remote user interviews, including recruiting participants, scheduling sessions, hosting calls, and generating reports.
- Kantar: While they offer a vast range of use cases, their ConceptEvaluate AI platform stands out for rapid concept screening. It can simultaneously test concepts with up to 100 participants, making it valuable for efficiently filtering through multiple concepts in early development stages.
Up next, we'll provide a comprehensive overview of Pollfish, our survey platform that excels at concept testing, followed by an overview of the other concept testing tools on this list.
Category #1: Concept Testing Survey Platforms
1. Pollfish
Pollfish is our DIY survey platform that excels at running monadic tests, sequential monadic tests, and other concept testing methodologies. Our highly intuitive, easy-to-use interface, offers a robust questionnaire design, audience targeting, and data analysis capabilities that seasoned market researchers rely on.
We offer pre-built survey templates designed with market research best practices for product concept testing, pricing testing, logo testing, ad testing, A/B testing, and more. This provides a strategic head start by allowing you to edit proven, ready-made frameworks rather than building everything completely from scratch.
There are 4 key reasons you should choose Pollfish for concept testing:
- Reason #1: High-quality audience panels with rigorous data quality standards.
- Reason #2: Pay-per-response pricing model with complete transparency and no hidden fees.
- Reason #3: Fast turnaround times — from a few hours for broad audiences to a few days for more niche groups.
- Reason #4: Robust functionality across three key areas: audience targeting, questionnaire design, and data analysis.
Let’s dive in.
Reason #1: High-Quality Audience Panels with Rigorous Data Quality Standards
Why is this important? Data quality should be your top priority when choosing a concept testing survey platform. Even a perfectly designed survey will produce unreliable results if respondents are fraudulent or provide low-quality answers, leading to flawed decisions about which concepts to choose or invest in.
Our Approach: At Pollfish, through our parent company Prodege (the world's largest single panel owner), we maintain our own first-party respondent communities rather than purchasing data from external third-party providers.
This direct ownership approach enables us to maintain rigorous quality controls that ensure high-quality concept testing survey results:
❇️ Diverse activities beyond surveys help us verify respondents are real people, not bots: Through communities like Swagbucks, panelists earn rewards not just from surveys but also from activities like playing games, watching videos, or uploading shopping receipts.
These activities serve as authenticity checks — for example, uploading an actual shopping receipt is something only a real person can do, giving us certainty that our respondents are genuine humans rather than bots.
❇️ Shopping receipt uploads enable more accurate targeting than self-reported preferences: When participants upload shopping receipts (e.g., showing they've recently purchased an energy drink), you can precisely target them based on verified purchase behavior.
This is far more reliable than self-reported preferences, where participants might falsely claim they buy energy drinks just to qualify for more surveys.
❇️ 30-day evaluation period: New members undergo a mandatory 30-day evaluation period where they complete internal profiling surveys. We closely monitor their responses, and only participants who consistently provide high-quality responses are approved to take client surveys.
❇️ Manual-review of open-ended responses: Every open-ended survey response is manually reviewed by a human team member to ensure quality and filter out nonsensical or low-effort answers.
❇️ Sophisticated fraud prevention measures, including unique user IDs (to prevent duplicate entries), speeding detection, straight lining detection (repeatedly choosing the same answer), trap questions, anti VPN measures, etc.
The bottom line: By choosing Pollfish for your concept testing survey needs, you can trust that your data is reliable and the decisions you make based on that data are well-founded.
Reason #2: Pay-per-Response Pricing Model with Complete Transparency and No Hidden Fees
❇️ We use a straightforward pay-per-response pricing model, starting at $0.95 per response, with no subscription fees or annual contracts required.
Pollfish scales with your concept testing needs (or other survey needs), so you only pay for the responses you actually collect — never for unused capacity.
❇️ As you build your survey, pricing is always visible in the upper-right corner and updates in real-time as you add targeting filters.
What you see is exactly what you'll pay, with no surprise fees or hidden charges:
❇️ Here's how our transparent pricing calculator works based on the example above:
- Base cost: $0.95 per response
- Three targeting filters are added:
- Marital status → Married (+$0.55 per response)
- Children in household → 2 (+$0.55 per response)
- Pets in household → Dog (+$0.55 per response)
- Total cost per response: $2.60 with these additional filters
- For 500 responses: $1,300 total cost clearly displayed upfront
That's your final cost — no subscription fees, no hidden charges, no surprises.
As one of our customers shared on Trustpilot:
“The dollar amount they quote you in their cost calculator tool, and the number they show when you're developing the survey, is the number you pay. I was burned multiple times by SurveyMonkey charging me unexpected amounts and making it difficult to quit an expensive subscription. I'm so happy to have found Pollfish as an alternative. Their support team also responds VERY quickly to chat messages and has been tremendously helpful the few times I had questions.”
– Read the full review here
Reason #3: Fast Turnaround Times (From a Few Hours for Broad Audiences to a Few Days for More Niche Groups)
Since Pollfish uses first-party audience data from Prodege rather than purchasing from external third-party sources through middlemen, we can deliver exceptionally fast turnaround times.
❇️ For concept testing surveys targeting broad, general population segments, you can receive results in as little as a few hours for several hundred responses.
As multiple reviewers have noted on Trustpilot:
“The thing that amazes me most is how quickly you can get your data results back. So fast! Usually in a couple of hours.”
– Read the full review here“I needed a 25 question survey answered, and was able to get 500 completed surveys in 8 hours with Pollfish. The presentation of the results is very impressive and the demographics information Pollfish provided is invaluable.”
– Read the full review here“I honestly thought the results would take days, and I was starting to get worried because I was using Pollfish for a quarterly goal and I was trying to make it before the deadline. However, I received the results in literally just a few hours!”
– Read the full review here“Much more affordable than all the alternatives I found, and I had all my results ready within just a couple of hours.”
– Read the full review here
❇️ For more specific targeting requirements, completion typically takes several days (e.g., household income over $250,000, live in New York, and own a dog).
This is still exceptionally fast compared to other platforms for similar audiences. As several reviewers have noted:
“I'm amazed at how quickly the platform was able to deliver rich, segmentable data from over 500 respondents. I had feature-ready insights in only 3 days.”
– Read the full review here“I've used Pollfish before so when I needed to test concepts for a new business pitch in 5 countries over the holiday, I turned to Pollfish. The surveys were easy to set up, allowed me to select my very specific target and launched right away. Within a couple of days I had my results in an easy to interpret, actionable format well within my budget.”
– Read the full review here“I found the platform super-easy to use and we received feedback on our new name and logo from our target audience within a few days.”
– Read the full review here
For specific turnaround time estimates based on your unique audience requirements, please contact us here, or submit your question via live chat. We’re available to help 24/7.
Reason #4: Robust Functionality Across 3 Key Areas (Audience Targeting, Questionnaire Design & Data Analysis)
Robust functionality across audience targeting, questionnaire design, and data analysis is critical:
- If you can't precisely target your ideal audience, you'll test concepts with the wrong people, and act on flawed insights.
- If your questionnaire design capabilities are limited, you won't be able to create sophisticated concept testing surveys with proper A/B testing structures, branching logic, and the diverse question types necessary to capture high quality data.
- If your data analysis tools are lacking, you won't be able to identify the nuanced patterns and demographic differences that reveal which concepts truly resonate with your target market.
Up next, we’ll discuss Pollfish’s key features and capabilities across these three areas.
❇️ Audience Targeting
With Pollfish, you can choose from 50+ targeting filters across 6 categories: Demographics, Geographic Criteria, Consumer Lifestyle, Employment & Occupation, Behavioral Data, and Media.
While most customers use only a subset of the below options, here's the complete range of targeting filters available to ensure you reach exactly the right audience for your concept testing surveys:
❇️ Demographics
Age, Gender, Hispanic Origin, Marital Status, Languages Spoken, Education Level, US Voter Registration, Household Income (US), Age & Gender of Child(ren) in Household, Type of Home, Pets in Household, Political Party Support, Hispanic Level of Acculturation, Parental Status / Pregnancy Status, Race, Device Type, Device Operating System (OS), Ethnicity, Number of Children in Household
❇️ Geographic Criteria
US State, US Division, US DMA, US Region, US Statistical Area (CBSA), US County, US Zip Code
❇️ Consumer Lifestyle
Beverage Consumption, Hobbies & Interests, Sports Participation, Gambling Participation, Music Streaming Services Use, Movie Theater Frequency, Home Movie Viewing Frequency, Video Game Participation, Video Game Consoles, Video Game Genres, Travel by Air for Business/Leisure, Vehicle Make/Brand Own or Lease, Vehicle Type Own or Lease, Health Ailment Diagnosis
❇️ Employment & Occupation
Employment Status, Industry Work In, B2B Department, Number of Employees, Job Title
❇️ Behavioral Data
Brands Purchased (In-Store), Online Shopping: Retailer, In-Store Shopper, Category Buyers, Retail Channels Shopped (In-Store), Websites Visited, Retail Channels Shopped (Online)
❇️ Media
Video Streaming Services Used
❇️ Custom Quotas
You can set custom quotas with ease to prevent bias in your survey results, whether across age groups, gender, income levels, or any other criteria you choose.
❇️ Questionnaire Design
No matter how robust or sophisticated your concept testing questionnaire needs to be, Pollfish provides the tools you need:
❇️ 16 question types, including Single selection, Multiple selection, Open ended, Numeric open ended, Description, Rating stars, Slider, Ranking, Matrix single selection, Matrix multiple selection, Net Promoter Score (NPS), A/B test, Conjoint analysis, Max Diff, and Van Westendorp.
❇️ AI survey creation: Quickly create concept testing surveys by simply describing your research goals.
For example, you can prompt the AI with "I want to test 3 packaging designs for a new food product" and it will automatically generate appropriate questions, logic flows, answer options, and more.
❇️ Multimedia questions: Insert video or image-based concept visuals (e.g., product mockups, packaging designs, logos, ad ideas, etc.) directly into your survey questions, with the option to require full video viewing before respondents can proceed.
❇️ Answer shuffling: Automatically randomize answer choices to eliminate bias.
For example, when testing three logo concepts, Pollfish ensures each logo appears in different randomized positions (preventing the first option from being unfairly selected more often due to primacy bias).
❇️ Screening questions: Add screening questions to automatically filter out participants based on their responses.
For example, when testing a new energy drink concept, you can ask "How many energy drinks do you consume per week?" and automatically filter out anyone who responds with less than 2, allowing only qualified prospects who consume 2+ energy drinks weekly to proceed with your survey.
❇️ Conditional branching: Create dynamic survey paths based on previous responses, allowing you to show different concepts or follow-up questions depending on participant answers.
For example, if someone identifies as a "frequent online shopper," they see e-commerce app concepts, while "in-store shoppers" are shown retail experience concepts instead.
❇️ Explore the full range of Pollfish’s survey design capabilities.
❇️ Data Analysis
Pollfish makes it easy to collect and filter the data to get the insights you need, eliminating the need for external tools like Excel. We offer:
❇️ Demographic filtering: Analyze how different concepts perform across specific audience segments.
For example, see how millennials vs. baby boomers respond to your packaging designs, or compare male vs. female reactions to your ad concepts.
❇️ Response-based filtering: Drill down into specific feedback patterns by filtering responses.
For example, focus only on participants who rated a concept as "very appealing" to understand what drove their positive reaction.
❇️ Advanced insights builder: Create complex multi-variable analyses and charts without Excel.
For example, if you ran a concept test and wanted to analyze feedback from "males who live in the Northeast and Midwest, who are married, and who rated concepts as extremely believable," you can simply drag and drop these variables and generate instant charts with just a few clicks.
❇️ Statistical significance testing: Automatically identify which concept performance differences are statistically significant.
❇️ Charts in your brand colors: Customize each chart with your company's brand colors automatically, eliminating the time you'd otherwise spend manually formatting charts in external design tools.
❇️ Built-in PowerPoint creation: Create complete PowerPoint slide decks directly within Pollfish while analyzing your data to streamline your workflow.
❇️ Flexible export options: Export your survey results and charts in multiple formats, including PDF, Excel, crosstabs, SPSS, and more.
Sign Up for a Free Pollfish Account
Create your free Pollfish account today — no credit card required, no commitments — and start building your first concept testing survey in minutes with our easy-to-use, intuitive interface.
2. Qualtrics
Qualtrics is best suited for large enterprise companies, and their pricing is often cost-prohibitive for small and medium-sized businesses.
Our article on Qualtrics alternatives elaborates on how Pollfish stands apart, including higher quality survey data, flexible pay-per-response pricing structure (rather than being locked into a long-term commitment), stellar customer service, and more.
Qualtrics’ features can be divided into 3 categories:
1. Customer Experience
- Voice of Customer
- Omnichannel Experience Management
- Digital Experience Analytics
- Website & App Feedback
- Location Experience Hub
- Online Reputation Management
- Contact Center Analytics
- Quality Management & Compliance
- Agent Coaching
- Edge Instant Insights
2. Employee Experience
- Employee Engagement
- Employee Pulse
- Employee Research
- Candidate Experience Management
- Employee Onboarding & Exit
- 360 Development Feedback
- Employee Retention Analytics
- Continuous Employee Listening
3. Strategy & Research
- Strategic Market Research
- Product Research
- Brand and Communication Research
- User Experience Research
- Edge Audiences
3. SurveyMonkey
As mentioned, SurveyMonkey suits simpler survey needs. Our article on SurveyMonkey alternatives elaborates on how Pollfish stands apart, offering advantages like more affordable pay-per-response pricing for all question types, superior survey data quality, and the inclusion of most premium features without requiring a subscription upgrade.
Some of SurveyMonkey’s key features and capabilities include:
- Customizable survey design features, although crucial ones like skip logic are only available with a subscription.
- Ability to target SurveyMonkey’s vetted, pre-recruited respondents.
- Built-in analysis capabilities, including tools like Word Cloud, which automatically identify common themes and phrases from open ended questions.
- Diverse concept testing methodologies, including logo design testing, name testing, package testing, or message & claims testing.
Category #2: Concept Testing Platforms Beyond Traditional Surveys
4. MESH01
MESH01 specializes in concept testing for physical products where hands-on interaction is crucial. They handle recruiting qualified testers (70,000+ person testing community) and collect comprehensive feedback through:
- Activity logs
- Surveys
- Image and video uploads
- Performance zone heatmaps
- Real-time product usage data
They offer unique industry insights and reports, such as The State of Product Testing and Product Testing Program Trends.
5. System1
System1 offers innovative concept testing methodologies, and some of their key solutions and capabilities include:
- Predictive trading game where participants buy or sell "shares" in concepts (providing market-like validation).
- 1–5 Star Rating system with validated predictive power — 5-Star concepts typically achieve triple the sales of 1-Star concepts.
- FaceTrace technology that measures genuine emotional responses to visual concepts and new products.
- Database of 54,000+ concepts to benchmark your performance against.
- Comprehensive ad testing tools.
Overall, it’s a great platform to help optimize product development and concept testing.
6. Highlight
Some of Highlight's key solutions and capabilities include:
- At in-home product testing across diverse use cases, from food and beverage tastings to packaging design validation, and many other product ideas.
- Quick-touch pulse surveys, with access to a large community of product testers and live data dashboards, as well as the ability to choose a specific target audience, design your questionnaire, field results, and gain actionable insights in a matter of hours.
- MaxDiff testing, TURF testing, and other methodologies.
The key industries Highlight serves include Food, Beverage & Supplements, Personal Care & Beauty, Alcohol (RTD, Beer, Liquor, Mocktail), Kids Products, Pet Care & Accessories, Household Cleaning & Goods, and Apparel Footwear.
7. Hotjar
As it pertains to concept testing, some of Hotjar’s key offerings and capabilities include:
- Hotjar Surveys: Trigger concept testing surveys while users browse your site (e.g., after users spend 30 seconds on the pricing page). You have multiple survey deployment options, including pop-ups, buttons, bubbles, embedded widgets, full-screen overlays, and more. Hotjar also offers pre-built templates and AI survey creation to speed up the process.
- Hotjar Engage: Handles end-to-end remote user interviews, including recruiting participants, scheduling sessions, hosting calls, generating reports, and more. They offer a diverse pool of 200,000+ participants from 130+ countries and 25 industries, though you can also interview your own customers.
8. Kantar
While Kantar offers a vast range of uses, their ConceptEvaluate AI platform stands out for rapid concept screening:
- You can simultaneously test concepts with up to 100 participants, making it valuable for efficiently filtering through multiple concepts in the early development process.
- Their survey-based AI model has been trained on over 39,000 concepts, so you have more confidence you’re making informed decisions.
- You can receive feedback and results in as little as 24 hours.
- Some of the key metrics they track include Predictive Trial, Predictive Uniqueness, and Predictive Relevance, which help increase your decision-making confidence.
- You can choose from two options, both of which increase in cost as you test more concepts:
- Self-Serve: Pricing starts at $360.
- Serviced by Kantar: Pricing starts at $5,500.
Overall, Kantar is a great platform to streamline concept development, and offers various unique research methods.
Sign Up for a Free Pollfish Account
Create your free Pollfish account today (no credit card required, no commitments) and start building your first concept testing survey in minutes with our easy-to-use, intuitive interface.
3 Survey Data Quality Issues Sabotaging Your Research (& How We Fix Them)
3 Survey Data Quality Issues Sabotaging Your Research (& How We Fix Them)
When conducting market research, data quality is the most critical factor. While that might sound obvious, it’s often not given enough consideration.
Even with a meticulously designed survey — solid logic, good flow, and bias controls — if respondents are fraudulent (e.g., bots) or rushing to finish, the data is flawed. This can lead to costly mistakes and damage credibility with leadership.
In this article, we’ll cover:
- 3 critical survey quality issues
- Issue #1: Bots posing as real respondents or survey farms (fraud caused by a network of real humans), contaminating data with fraudulent responses
- Issue #2: Respondent profiles and demographic information may become inaccurate over time, even if initially true
- Issue #3: Respondents providing low-quality, rushed, or contradictory answers
- How Pollfish, through our parent company Prodege — the world’s largest single panel owner — combats these issues via first-party panel ownership and the robust, multi-layered data quality safeguards we have in place.
Issue #1: Bots posing as real respondents or survey farms, contaminating data with fraudulent responses
The Problem
Survey fraud can be divided into 2 broad categories:
- Bots – Sophisticated automated scripts, or "bots," masquerade as genuine respondents. These bots may originate from click farms or individuals in various countries attempting to conceal their true location and pose as legitimate participants from target markets like the US.
- Survey Farms – Fraud caused by networks of real humans who register for multiple panelist accounts and attempt to complete as many surveys as possible while avoiding detection. Members of these networks pay a portion of any survey earnings to the owners of the websites where they go to learn the latest tricks to distinguish their location (e.g., using a legitimate IP address to mask their own) and how to create multiple accounts and qualify for surveys.
Our Solution
Prodege has an in-house, 40-person Panel Support, Security and Compliance Department which continually innovates and stays one step ahead of survey fraud. Some of the quality controls and processes we implement include:
❇️ Verifying Respondent Identities Through Diverse Activities Beyond Surveys
Many panels simply have people log in, answer surveys, and get paid without tracking any other behaviors. In contrast, through Prodege's flagship communities like Swagbucks, members can earn rewards not only from completing surveys but also by playing games, shopping online, uploading supermarket receipts, and more.
These additional activities provide valuable data points to verify respondent identities and build out fuller profiles. For example, if someone uploads a unique shopping receipt image, it confirms they are a real human as a bot couldn't replicate this behavior.
❇️ 14-Day Evaluation Period
Before a new panelist becomes eligible to participate in their 1st client survey, they must complete a number of internal quality measurement surveys over their first 14 days on the panel.
Panel members failing to meet our quality thresholds are removed from the panel. After the initial evaluation period, we continue to administer these surveys at random points in a member's panel lifespan.
❇️ Trust Scores
We’ve developed a proprietary solution leveraging AI plus machine learning, where each member is assigned a “Trust Score” shortly after registering for one of our panels. This score is updated based on ongoing inputs.
Based on the Trust Score, we may deactivate a member’s account, block entry to surveys and/or require additional identity verification (e.g., scan driver’s license).
❇️ Fraud Detection Technologies
This includes multi-level registration verification (e.g., CAPTCHA, Device ID Reputation, 100% Double Opt-In, etc.), tech consistency (carrier/targeting alignment check), single user IDs (no duplicate survey takers), sophisticated anti-VPN measures, etc.
Issue #2: Respondent profiles & demographic information may become inaccurate over time, even if initially true
The Problem
While some survey participants might intentionally misrepresent their demographics from the start, a more common issue is that respondent profiles naturally become outdated as individuals' circumstances and interests change over time.
This gradual drift can lead to inaccuracies in the data, even when participants provide honest answers during the initial profile setup.
Consider this scenario: A participant who initially reported being single may get married and have children but fail to update their marital status and parental information in their profile. Consequently, they may be incorrectly included in or excluded from surveys based on these factors.
The challenge for survey platforms lies in ensuring that participant profiles remain accurate and up-to-date, not just at the point of creation but also throughout the respondent's lifecycle. Failing to do so can lead to skewed survey results, misallocated targeting efforts, and ultimately, flawed insights that misinform critical business decisions.
Our Solution
❇️ We go beyond relying on self-reported information by leveraging behavioral data. By analyzing purchase receipts and websites visited, we can identify potential mismatches between a participant's claimed profile and their actual behavior.
For instance, a participant may initially report being single and not having any children. However, if we observe a sudden and consistent increase in purchases related to baby products such as diapers, formula, or child safety equipment (through purchase receipt data), our system may flag this profile for potential updates to parental information.
Our ability to leverage behavioral data for demographic validation is made possible by Prodege's unique position as a company that owns and maintains its consumer communities directly. This stands in stark contrast to most survey platforms, who rely on third-party audience panels (a critical distinction we'll explore further in a later section).
Issue #3: Respondents providing rushed, low quality, or contradictory answers
The Problem
Even when a respondent is verified as a real person, the quality of their survey responses may still be lacking. This can manifest in several ways:
- Speeding and straight-lining: If a survey is designed to take 5 minutes on average, but a respondent completes it in 30 seconds, it raises serious doubts about their level of attention and engagement. Also, some respondents may simply select the same answer choice repeatedly (e.g., always choosing "B" on multiple-choice questions) without actually reading the questions.
- Low-quality open-ended responses: When presented with open-ended questions that require written input, some respondents may provide brief, irrelevant, or nonsensical answers rather than investing the time and effort to share meaningful insights.
- Contradictory answers: Respondents who are not fully engaged or attentive may provide inconsistent or contradictory responses throughout the survey. For instance, they might indicate they've never used a particular product, but later claim to have purchased it within the past month.
- Disengaged respondents: These are real humans with good intentions who on occasion may be multitasking (e.g., watching a movie or cooking while taking a survey), and thus submit lower quality responses.
Our Solution
❇️ Speeding detection: Our system monitors the time respondents spend on each question and flags those who complete the survey significantly faster than the average, indicating a lack of thoughtful engagement.
❇️ Straight-lining detection: We identify respondents who repeatedly select the same answer choice for multiple questions in a row.
❇️ Manual review of open ended responses: We strongly recommend including at least one open-ended question in every survey as an additional quality check. Our dedicated Project Management Team meticulously reviews these responses and removes and replaces any respondents who provide low-quality answers, such as:
- Random characters or irrelevant text.
- Overly brief answers where a detailed response is warranted.
- Answers that do not make sense given the context of the question.
- Any other indicators of poor engagement or lack of effort.
❇️ Red herring questions: We strategically insert our own "red herring" questions throughout the survey, designed specifically to check for contradictory answers and ensure respondents are paying attention.
❇️ And so much more.
Unique Advantage of Prodege: Staff of Research Experts Who Were End-Users of Data in Their Previous Roles
An additional unique advantage of Prodege versus traditional sample suppliers and audience monetizers is that we have a staff of research experts who were end-users of data in their roles at companies such as Hall & Partners, Ipsos, Kantar, Lieberman Research, Nielsen and NPD.
The team's experience preparing reports and dashboards to deliver insights to enterprise clients is layered into Prodege's research best practices, bringing a perspective to data quality missing at other sample firms.
The Bottom Line: Pollfish Delivers Reliable Data
Pollfish's unique approach, which leverages first-party data from Prodege, enables us to implement robust quality control measures and recruit a representative and engaged member base.
As a result, when you use Pollfish, you can trust that you're receiving the highest caliber of survey responses. As several of reviewers have noted on Trustpilot:
"The most important point to make is that I trust the responses of my survey. My target audience was very specific and I could tell that the responses were legitimately coming [from] subjects in my target audience.”
– Read the full review here
“Each time I use this service I am blown away by the speed with which the responses come in and with the detail which most of them include. You can tell that the respondents take this very seriously. They must really enjoy doing it.”
– Read the full review here
“I had to get some data on a product in a tricky sector. It was proving challenging to attract participants to my study. I was able to quickly get results and some insights to be able to move forward with my work using Pollfish.”
– Read the full review here
“I was very satisfied with the results I got from Pollfish. My company was conducting market research and received very insightful help from consumers who were all verified homeowners.”
– Read the full review here
Note: Click here to explore additional Pollfish reviews on Trustpilot.
Interested in Learning More About Pollfish?
Beyond exceptional data quality, Pollfish offers several other key benefits:
- Pay-per-response pricing model, starting at $0.95 per response – no subscriptions, no long term commitments, just pay for what you actually use.
- Transparent pricing: As you build your survey, you'll see the total price update in real-time (it's clearly visible in the upper-right-hand corner, and we don't hide it). What you see is exactly what you'll pay, and there are no surprise charges.
- Quick turnaround time, with general population surveys completed in just a few hours and more specialized audience surveys within a matter of days.
- Comprehensive suite of features, including sophisticated questionnaire design, audience targeting, and data analysis capabilities, to support even the most complex survey research needs.
For more details on the advantages of Pollfish and guidance on choosing the best DIY market research survey tool for your needs, refer to this article.
In addition, for details regarding Prodege’s done-for-you market research service offering, reach out here.
Create a Free Pollfish Account Account or Book a Demo
We invite you to:
- Create a free Pollfish account, no credit card required.
- Book a demo call, where we’ll provide a personalized walkthrough of our platform and answer any questions you may have.
6 Brand Research Platforms: Types & When to Use Each
6 Brand Research Platforms: Types & When to Use Each
In general, brand research platforms can be categorized into three main types:
- Survey tools, which are ideal for collecting quantitative data from large sample sizes to gain insights into overall brand perceptions, purchase behaviors, brand awareness levels, and more.
- Social listening tools, which let you monitor and analyze brand mentions, sentiment, and organic conversations happening on social media platforms.
- Direct customer feedback tools (interviews, focus groups, in-home product testing, etc.), which provide rich qualitative insights by engaging with customers 1-on-1.
In this post, we cover 6 brand research platforms — each with its own unique strengths and focus areas:
- Pollfish: Our survey-focused DIY tool offering quick turnaround times, transparent pay-per-response pricing, and access to diverse, high-quality respondent pools.
- Qualtrics: A survey-focused tool with pricing and features more suited for larger enterprise companies.
- Kantar: Pricing geared towards enterprise companies. Best known for their full-service brand research consulting offerings, which combine surveys with additional research approaches.
- Brandwatch: Specializes in social listening and tracking brand mentions on social media platforms.
- Suzy: While they offer surveys, a standout feature is Suzy Live, which lets you conduct 1-on-1 interviews, focus groups, and in-home product testing all within one platform.
- GWI: While they offer surveys, you can also get synthetic data via GWI Spark, an AI assistant that answers questions about your audience using GWI's global survey data. This provides more accurate insights compared to searching the web.
1. Pollfish
Pollfish is our user-friendly, DIY survey solution that companies of all sizes use to conduct brand research.
In the sections below, we'll cover:
- How to run brand research surveys using Pollfish in three steps: Design your questionnaire, select your survey audience, and analyze your data.
- The advantages of Pollfish's first-party respondent communities: Access higher quality audiences and survey responses compared to competitors who purchase respondents from external third-party panels.
- Pollfish's transparent, pay-as-you-go pricing model: Our pricing model offers greater affordability than competitors who charge subscription fees.
- The quick turnaround times you can expect from Pollfish: Turnaround times range from just a few hours for mainstream audiences to a few days for more niche audiences.
3 Simple Steps for Running Brand Research Surveys with Pollfish
Running brand research surveys with Pollfish involves three key steps:
- Step 1: Design your questionnaire — Start with brand research survey templates or create a survey from scratch. Choose from 14 question types and take advantage of advanced features like screening questions, conditional branching based on previous responses, answer shuffling, and much more.
- Step 2: Select your survey audience — No matter how broad or niche you want your audience to be, Pollfish can accommodate your needs with 50+ audience filters to choose from.
- Step 3: Analyze your data — Easily visualize and manipulate your survey data within our platform to gain the insights you need, rather than having to export to Excel.
Pollfish excels in these areas, allowing you to conduct brand research without compromising your objectives or methodology due to platform limitations.
Now, let's take a closer look at each of these steps.
Step #1: Design Your Questionnaire
Although not a complete list, the following are some of our most frequently utilized questionnaire design features:
❇️ Brand Research Templates
While you can create surveys from scratch, many choose to utilize brand research survey templates with pre-written questions that can be customized as needed.
These templates offer 3 benefits:
- Save time by providing a starting point for your survey.
- Employ methodological best practices to ensure high-quality data collection.
- Ensure consistency across surveys, allowing you to benchmark changes over time and easily compare data from past surveys.
Popular templates include:
- Brand Awareness Template: Assess whether consumers are familiar with your brand or have heard of it at a minimum.
- Brand Perception Template: Understand how your brand is perceived compared to competitor brands.
- Brand Diagnostic Template: Evaluate your brand's overall health at a specific point in time.
- CPG Brand Awareness + Perceptions Template: Measure consumer familiarity and perceptions of Consumer Packaged Goods (CPG) brands
❇️ 16 Question Types
No matter which type of questions you want to use for your brand research questionnaire, Pollfish has you covered with 16 question types, including: Single selection, Multiple selection, Open ended, Numeric open ended, Description, Rating stars, Slider, Ranking, Matrix single selection, Matrix multiple selection, Net Promoter Score (NPS), A/B test, Conjoint analysis, Max Diff, and Van Westendorp.
- Screening Logic: Filter out participants who don't meet specific criteria.
- Example: If a respondent answers "No" to the question, "Are you aware of [Brand X]?", you can route them to the survey's conclusion page. If they select "Yes," you can display follow-up questions about [Brand X]'s perceived quality.
- Conditional Branching: Create personalized survey paths based on respondents' answers, presenting them with tailored follow-up questions.
- Example: In a smartphone preference survey, ask participants what they prioritize most when selecting a device (battery life, camera quality, or brand reputation). Using conditional branching, direct them to different question sets based on their selected priority.
- Answer Shuffling: Randomize the order of answer choices presented to each respondent to minimize order bias.
- Example: When asking respondents to rank their favorite soda brands, one respondent might see "Coca-Cola, Fanta, Sprite," while another sees "Sprite, Fanta, Coca-Cola." This minimizes bias from respondents consistently favoring options at the top or bottom of the list.
❇️ "Other" and "None of the Above"
When creating brand research surveys, you'll often need to include "Other" or "None of the above" as answer choices. Instead of wasting time manually adding these options to each question (a notoriously frustrating task for market researchers), you can automatically add these answer options to each question with just a few clicks.
❇️ Click here to see the full list of advanced questionnaire design features.
Step #2: Select Your Survey Audience
Regardless of how broad or niche your desired audience may be, Pollfish can help:
❇️ Choose from 50+ audience filters in 6 categories, including: Demographics, Geographic Criteria, Consumer Lifestyle, Employment & Occupation, Behavioral Data, and Media.
For example, you could target millennial female grocery shoppers in Los Angeles between 29–44 years old with household incomes exceeding $50,000 who have recently purchased cold cereal.
❇️ Target shoppers who have bought specific brands or visited certain stores: Rather than broadly targeting "cold cereal" buyers, you can refine your audience to include those who have purchased specific brands like Cheerios, Frosted Flakes, Reese's Puffs, etc.
Similarly, you can target shoppers of particular stores such as Whole Foods, Zara, Costco, etc. This data is sourced from self-uploaded receipts by panel members, ensuring greater accuracy compared to potentially exaggerated self-reported information.
❇️ Set audience quotas: Avoid skewing results with an imbalanced sample by setting audience quotas. For instance, you can require 50% of respondents to be Millennials (ages 29–44) and 50% to be Gen X (ages 45–60).
These are just a few of the audience targeting capabilities available within Pollfish.
Step #3: Analyze Your Survey Results
Pollfish simplifies the process of visualizing survey results, manipulating and filtering data, and obtaining insights, all within a single platform, eliminating the need for external data analysis tools like Excel.
❇️ Visualize Survey Results in Various Formats
For each survey question, easily visualize the data using color-coded charts, graphs, tables, and more.
❇️ Filter by Specific Audience Segments or Responses
If you want to display survey results from a specific age group (e.g., millennials aged 29–44) or zero in on particular responses (e.g., only those who are "highly likely" to recommend your brand), you can do so with just a few clicks. All charts and visualizations will automatically update to reflect the filtered data.
❇️ Filter and analyze data by multiple variables simultaneously
Suppose you wanted to compare purchasing intent across 4 different demographics, such as age, gender, household income, and geography, you could easily filter, splice, and dice the data to get the exact answers you need. Pollfish also automatically generates graphs based on your selected variables, eliminating the need to export the data to third-party tools.
❇️ Customize Charts to Match Your Branding
You can customize each graph to fit your brand's color scheme. For example, if your brand colors are yellow (#FFFF00) and red (#FF0000), you can easily apply these colors to the graphs.
❇️ Statistical Testing
Suppose you ran a survey to compare brand awareness between two age groups: 29–44 and 45–60. The results reveal that 75% of respondents aged 29–44 know your brand, while only 60% of those aged 45–60 do. You have the option to turn on stat testing to check if this difference is statistically significant.
Pollfish will automatically highlight the results in a graph, which you can export using standard statistical notation, with capital and lowercase letters indicating the significance level.
❇️ Create Presentations within the Platform
Build presentation slides within Pollfish while your survey is still in the field, allowing you to have a nearly complete report by the time the survey is finished. Export the presentation into an editable PowerPoint file for further customization.
❇️ Export Data in Multiple Formats
Easily export your survey data to PDF, Excel, crosstabs, and SPSS, depending on your needs.
These are just a few of the data analysis capabilities available within Pollfish.
Advantages of Pollfish's First-Party Respondent Communities
Pollfish's proprietary first-party respondent panels (owned and operated through parent company Prodege) ensure high-quality survey responses. This sets us apart from competitors who purchase survey respondents from external third-party providers. Here’s how:
❇️ Genuine Human Participants, Not Bots
Our panelists participate in a range of activities within the Prodege ecosystem, from online shopping and receipt uploads to gaming, web browsing, and more. These are all activities bots simply cannot perform, ensuring that your survey audience consists of genuine, verified human participants.
In contrast, many 3rd party providers limit respondents' activities to surveys alone, which often leads to bots and fraudulent responses.
❇️ Panelists Aren't Bombarded with Constant Survey Invites
Our panelists choose when to take surveys at their discretion. This approach attracts more engaged, higher-quality respondents. It stands in stark contrast to 3rd-party providers who blast respondents with emails and text messages to participate, leading to survey fatigue, disengagement, and lower quality responses.
❇️ 30-Day Evaluation for New Panelists
New respondents must complete a 30-day evaluation period, answering internal profiling surveys. Those who fail to meet our stringent quality standards are filtered out, ensuring only the most reliable participants make it to your surveys.
❇️ Rigorous Anti-Fraud Measures
Pollfish includes unique user IDs (prevents duplicate survey takers), trap questions, speeding prevention, anti-VPN measures, gibberish detection, straight-lining detection (detects if folks repeatedly select the same answer), and human review.
❇️ Trust Scores Encourage High-Quality Responses
Pollfish assigns each respondent a "trust score" based on the quality of their survey responses over time. Panelists with higher trust scores gain access to more survey opportunities and other lucrative activities within the Prodege ecosystem.
These are just a few ways Pollfish ensures the highest-quality respondents for your brand research needs. This is crucial because even the most meticulously crafted survey will yield compromised results if your respondent pool contains bots or participants who rush through responses without careful consideration.
Transparent, Pay-per-Response Pricing Model
Companies of all sizes benefit from our transparent, pay-per-response pricing model:
❇️ Usage-Based Pricing
Unlike some competitors who charge hefty monthly or annual subscription fees (which may result in paying for unused capacity), Pollfish charges based on the number of responses you'd like to receive. This ensures that you only pay for what you use.
❇️ Unlimited Team Members
With Pollfish, you can add unlimited team members to your account without incurring any extra costs. In contrast, subscription-based tools often charge for additional licenses, which can quickly add up.
❇️ Transparent Pricing with No Hidden Fees
At Pollfish, the price displayed is exactly what you pay, with no unexpected charges.
For example, suppose you want to run a brand perception survey for your dog food company. You start with a base cost of $0.95 per response. Then, you can choose to add audience targeting filters.
For instance:
- Targeting households with an income over $200,000 would add $0.55 per response
- Targeting dog owners would add another $0.55 per response
In this scenario, the cost per response would be $2.05. If you need 600 responses for your survey, the total cost would be $1,230.
That's precisely what you would pay — no surprises, no hidden fees.
Fast Turnaround Time: From Several Hours to a Few Days
We take pride in delivering exceptionally fast turnaround times, made possible by our proprietary first-party respondent communities.
❇️ General Population Surveys (Mainstream Topics)
For surveys targeting mainstream audiences (such as streaming service subscribers, frequent takeout orderers, pet owners, etc.), we can often gather 500+ responses within just a few hours.
❇️ Niche or Highly Targeted Audience Surveys
When surveying niche audiences (such as aerospace engineers, board-certified dermatologists, etc.), the inherently smaller populations and fewer qualifying respondents typically result in a turnaround time of a few days. However, the exact timeline varies based on the specificity of your criteria.
Have questions about the turnaround time for your specific audience? We'd be happy to help — please reach out to discuss your specific needs.
Get Started with Pollfish
To begin using Pollfish, you have three options:
- Create a free account to explore the platform and start creating your own surveys right away.
- Schedule a demo walkthrough to learn how Pollfish can support your specific brand research objectives.
- Inquire about our full-service brand research option, where our experienced team will manage your entire project from start to finish. This includes crafting the survey, identifying and targeting your ideal audience, analyzing data, and delivering a customized report tailored to your unique needs and objectives.
2. Qualtrics
Qualtrics is a platform geared towards larger enterprises, with pricing to match. In contrast, Pollfish offers a more accessible and cost-effective solution that's well-suited for businesses of all sizes.
To help you understand the key differences between Pollfish and Qualtrics, we've conducted an in-depth analysis that covers crucial aspects such as data quality, pricing, customer support, and more.
3. Kantar
Kantar is primarily geared towards serving enterprise clients. While they offer DIY options, their core focus is on providing strategic consulting and full-service research solutions.
Kantar has a strong specialization in brand research and strategy. Some of their key brand-focused offerings include:
- BrandDynamics (brand tracking)
- BrandEvaluator (brand equity measurement)
- BrandSnapshot powered by BrandZ (brand equity snapshot)
- BrandCampaign (creative mix optimization)
4. Brandwatch
Brandwatch can help you gain valuable consumer insights beyond traditional methods like surveys and focus groups. Here are some of its key features and benefits:
- Monitor when people mention your brand name across various online channels, including social media platforms, news outlets, popular broadcast sources, and more.
- Identify which keywords and hashtags are trending in relation to your brand. For example, discover that there were 350 mentions using the hashtag #ecofriendly for your brand in a specific time period. This information can help you make more informed decisions.
- Perform a historical trend analysis to see how topics related to your brand have evolved and gain actionable insights.
- Compare your brand's online presence and social media engagement with your competitors through social consumer research.
5. Suzy
While Suzy offers survey capabilities, what truly sets it apart is its qualitative research functionality. A particular standout feature, Suzy Live, provides an all-in-one market research platform where you can facilitate:
- One-on-one interviews
- Focus groups for collaborative discussions
- In-home product testing with real-time feedback
6. GWI
GWI provides survey capabilities, but one of its most distinctive features is GWI Spark, an AI-powered assistant. GWI Spark utilizes the company's extensive global survey data to precisely answer questions about your target audience, delivering more accurate insights than those obtained through web searches.
Furthermore, GWI offers a wide range of data sets covering various demographics and consumer behavior patterns in areas like sports, gaming, travel, automotive, consumer technology, luxury goods, and several others.
Get Started with Pollfish
To begin using Pollfish: