What do consumers really want? GWI can tell you.

What if it was possible to find out what consumers prefer, anywhere in the world, with just a few clicks?

This is what GWI offers. And we at Permira think it will revolutionize the market research industry.

Consumers are spending more time across digital channels, forcing brands, advertisers and publishers to recognize the digital patterns of consumers and ultimately compete for their attention.

• What are gamers’ biggest motivations and frustrations with video games?
• What fitness devices are most popular with sports enthusiasts?
• How much does sustainability influence Gen Z’s view of a brand?

GWI has a globally harmonized dataset (48 countries and counting), delivered through an intuitive online platform. Customers can help themselves to insights representative of 2.7 billion digitally-connected consumers and can select from over 40,000 attributes and 4,000 brands. Once inside GWI’s platform, a user can drill down into targeted audiences with data sets like GWI Gaming, GWI Kids, and GWI Sports. If there is a need to go even deeper, custom inquiries can be launched on a specific population to find additional learnings.

Today, most market research is still local, offline and manual. Yet, this is an industry that focuses on audiences that are largely online and all over the world, especially since the onset of the pandemic. GWI’s approach to market research is much faster and more cost-effective. It democratizes insights, which opens up entirely new categories of users and stakeholders. Many of GWI’s customers are not in ‘research jobs’ because every decision-maker is now an empowered data storyteller: salespeople, marketers, product teams, recruiters and CEOs, to name a few.

Internet behaviours since 2020. Source: GWI

How does GWI do it?

It was while Tom, GWI’s CEO and Founder, worked as a consumer research expert at an advertising agency, that the idea for GWI first came about. He was faced with briefs from brands that needed a world view of their consumers' online needs and behaviors. The traditional market research methods and tools at his disposal made it near impossible - highly expensive, disjointed and very time consuming. It involves commissioning a market research provider who will organize a team, write a survey, and field it across multiple panel providers.

Then, the service provider will have to clean the data, and repeat the same process across all targeted markets. Often, these projects require an internal team to manage the external team, adding more burden to an already tight budget. And still the sample sizes will be limited, with outputs slow to emerge, difficult to update and lacking uniformity. He knew there must be a way to overcome this with technology.

The power of GWI lies in its research management platform. This proprietary technology is able to leverage a network of panel providers to continuously collect millions of survey results from respondents across the globe. Once this massive dataset is ingested, GWI tags it (taxonomy labelling), cleans it (fraud/bad respondent detection), normalizes it (fill quotas) and weighs it (find statistical significance). And then, any type of user can access these insights via an easy to use platform, and even import their own first party data to enrich their findings. This is what makes GWI a category-defining company.

At Permira, marketing and sales technology is a core theme for us. We have developed a differentiated investment strategy focused on the digital customer and over the years been fortunate to partner with some leading companies in the space, including CommentSold, FullStory, G2, Magento, Mirakl and Seismic. GWI is the perfect complement to this portfolio. We are excited about what comes next, and are looking forward to partnering with GWI to help roll-out new vertical data sets, continue international expansion and ultimately, make real-world insights available to everyone.