Good people, good culture, awful managers, weak methodology and terrible syndicated data - Anonymous employee Euromonitor Employee Review

Information produced from the Syndicated department is reflected in the main Euromonitor product that is called Passport. In general, the information is in very bad shape and constructed very poorly by using secondary sources, some interviews and in some cases retrieving other market research reports from clients to construct the information. The research is assigned to be done by single analysts in terms of industries and countries (Alcoholic drinks in Germany is done by John Doe for example) that needs to find a way to create thousands of data points with almost no sources of information due to limited methodology. Each industry covers hundreds of categories and subcategories, however, the methodology that consists of secondary research mixed with trade interviews is not enough to cover all of this. Most of the information estimated is not supported by any sources, especially at lower levels (Subcategories). Some industries were constructed entirely with just a few interviews that are usually focused on trends rather than quantitative information, 1 to 20 max. Most of the companies believe that Euromonitor has a team of analysts researching industries for an entire year, however, they only have a couple of months to construct everything, this is one of the reasons why the data quality is low. While the methodology could be good enough to research top-level data (Aggregated) in developed countries, incompetent management is usually focused on the details of the data, talking at SKU level, and generating content focused on new products and competing directly with the insights generated from other companies with more robust methodologies at this level like Nielsen, Mintel, IQVIA, etc. The detailed data in this company is a weakness and most of the qualitative reports focused on trending topics like e-commerce, private label or health and wellness are generated using weak data with no sources. The clueless syndicated leadership allowed the creation of a new industry to be researched focused on health and wellness, a weakness of the company that was created by pressure from the commercial team. Analysts usually face the research with the best of their intentions, however, in most of the cases they are powerless because they are not able to control the output, companies usually refuse to give information to the company, being the main explanation why there are many interviews talking about generalities and qualitative information. Getting interviews is not easy and getting data points is even more difficult. While other departments of the company seem to have a clear vision and a way to execute that vision in different levels, Syndicated department lacks a vision and this is materialized in poor performance and poor ways to execute simple tasks. There is a profound lack of professionalism and excessive freedom due to the lack of structure, training and resources. Work/life balance is high because people are concentrated in doing other things, like CSR or doing presentations and most importantly because managers and the leadership, in general, is not measuring anything. In a market research environment, focused on understanding markets by measuring it in different ways, it is expected they would have the same kind of gesture toward their employees, generating KPI to measure and track performance. This is perfectly visible in other departments of the company, while Syndicated continues to work in a "free" way with people lacking the motivation to come and believing this is the correct way of working because they haven't seen anything else.