InSites Consulting opens office in the Netherlands
Since 1 August InSites Consulting is the Netherlands’ latest new market research player.
InSites Consulting was established in 1997 as a spin-off of the Vlerick business school (www.vlerick.com) and has grown into an online market research company with a strong international focus. InSites Consulting’s roots are Belgian but 75% of its turnover is generated outside Belgium.
Today the company employs 75 people and will generate an estimated turnover of 12 million euro in 2008. Already 20% of InSites Consulting’s current client portfolio is established in the Netherlands. Big clients include Heineken, Sara Lee, Heinz, ING…
Kristof De Wulf, Managing Partner of InSites Consulting: “The opening of a local site in Rotterdam was one of our growth objectives for the following years. The choice for the Netherlands was obvious: online market research is generally accepted, we already have a great many Dutch clients, an online panel in excess of 170,000 Dutch people at our disposal and have noticed that increasingly more companies are organising themselves from a Benelux perspective. The main reason is of course that we can provide an even better service to our Dutch customers.”
The question remains whether the fiercely contested Dutch market can handle an extra player. Ramon Pardo, country manager for the Netherlands and ex-RI employee with more than 16 years experience in the sector has no doubts: “Of course the Netherlands has many good companies which have secured a strong position. I still see many possibilities for InSites Consulting to become an established value on the Dutch market. ‘Taking research forward’ is our base line, and it stands for a progressive focus on innovation and R&D, with great freedom for initiative and self-development. Moreover the academic roots of the organisation provide an important network that is actively used in this. In this way InSites Consulting is funding a PhD student of the University of Maastricht for the next 4 years to come up with innovative views together with us which can be translated into relevant solutions for our clients.”
In any case InSites Consulting is well integrated in the world-wide ESOMAR network: over the past 2 years the company has presented as many as 8 different papers at various conferences, 2 of which were nominated for best paper, and organised worldwide workshops about web 2.0 applications in market research. “Internally, we call it ‘connected research’. It allows us to bring our clients closer to their customers via various new techniques and methods such as online communities, bulletin boards, blogs, online qualitative research, etc.”, adds Kristof De Wulf.
InSites Consulting moved into the Rotterdam Brainpark on 1 August. For more information on InSites Consulting, please go to www.insites-consulting.nl.