Ipsos MORI was the name of a
market research
Market research is an organized effort to gather information about target markets and customers: know about them, starting with who they are. It is an important component of business strategy and a major factor in maintaining competitiveness. Ma ...
company based in
London
London is the capital and List of urban areas in the United Kingdom, largest city of England and the United Kingdom, with a population of just under 9 million. It stands on the River Thames in south-east England at the head of a estuary dow ...
, England which is now known as Ipsos and still continues as the UK arm of the global
Ipsos group. It was formed by a merger of Ipsos UK and MORI in October 2005.
The company is a member of the
British Polling Council and
Market Research Society
The Market Research Society is a professional body for market research based in London, England. It was established in 1946 at the offices of the London Press Exchange. It represents the views of its members to government and in the press.
MR ...
.
History
In 1946,
Mark Abrams formed a market research company called Research Services Ltd. (RSL). RSL operated until 1991 when it was acquired by
Ipsos, becoming Ipsos UK.
MORI (Market and Opinion Research International) was founded in 1969 by
Robert Worcester. Robert Worcester stepped down from chairmanship of MORI in June 2005. Ipsos announced it would acquire MORI in October 2005 for £88 million, and would merge it with Ipsos UK. The merged company was named Ipsos MORI.
Methodology
Ipsos MORI's research is conducted via a wide range of methodologies, using
computer-assisted telephone interviewing
Computer-assisted telephone interviewing (CATI) is a telephone surveying technique in which the interviewer follows a script provided by a software application. It is a structured system of microdata collection by telephone that speeds up the c ...
(CATI), as well as face-to-face (
CAPI) and Internet surveys. Many telephone surveys use a system called
random digit dialing to interview a representative group of the population.
Controversies
In May 2013, ''
The Sunday Times
''The Sunday Times'' is a British newspaper whose circulation makes it the largest in Britain's quality press market category. It was founded in 1821 as ''The New Observer''. It is published by Times Newspapers Ltd, a subsidiary of News UK, whi ...
'' reported that Ipsos MORI had negotiated an agreement with the
EE mobile phone network to commercialise the data on that company's 23 million subscribers. The article stated that Ipsos MORI was looking to sell this data to the Metropolitan Police and other parties. The data included "gender, age, postcode, websites visited, time of day text is sent
ndlocation of customer when call is made". When confronted by the newspaper, the Metropolitan Police indicated that they would not be taking the discussions any further. Ipsos MORI defended their actions, stressing that the company only received anonymised data, without any personally identifiable data on an individual customer, and underlining that reports are only ever made on aggregated groups of more than 50 customers.
References
External links
*
Recent Research
Ipsos Global Website{{Webarchive, url=https://web.archive.org/web/20170803033429/https://www.ipsos.com/ , date=2017-08-03
Public opinion research companies
Market research companies of the United Kingdom
Companies based in the London Borough of Tower Hamlets
Polling organisations in the United Kingdom