MRA Index Shows Research Industry On the Up

The Research Industry Index (RII) - the Marketing Research Association's indicator of business activity in the profession in the US - has reached 100 for the first time since the fourth quarter of 2010, signalling growing optimism across the sector.

From a series of online interviews with 216 senior research execs, the RII provides a composite score based on reported changes in multiple key business metrics, projects and staffing levels, as well as changes in business owners' perception of the 'health' of their firms.

In early 2011 and 2012, the index took a 'significant drop', slowly increasing throughout each year, but never quite reaching the 100 mark.

The MRA says contributing factors to the second quarter 2013 improvement were a 6 point increase in both RFPs/proposals and projects/booked revenue, and a 3 point increase in staffing. The difference between these figures is attributed to corporate researchers being slower to add staff than research providers.

MRA Director of Research Amy Shields (pictured) comments: 'Although we continue to see the same pattern of prior years in terms of starting out slow and gaining each quarter, it's difficult to not feel optimistic about one of the strongest increases in booked revenue and proposals since RII began tracking MR business activity in 2007, along with a higher overall index score for 2013 than we've seen since 2010.'

Web site: www.marketingresearch.org .