Mintel vs. Nielsen Scarborough

If you are new to an consumer-facing industry and want to get the lay of the land, this would be a great product for you. It could help you understand consumer wants and motivators, and would be helpful for keeping up with an industry, and for developing your own stance within that industry. If you're an agency, supporting a brand, Mintel is helpful when trying to develop brand strategies (branding, which claims are best to highlight, consumer profiling, etc).

Incentivized

• beautiful graphs and visualizations that can easily be taken and put into your reports.
• a wide variety of topics and industries covered
• Mintel customer service reps are extremely responsive and are always willing to help you dig deeper into a topic if needed
• data accessibility -- you can download a pdf report, raw data, or just read articles

Incentivized

• it would be nice if Mintel got even more specialized with some of their industry/product groups. For example, we wanted to do research on what was happening in the consumer orthodontia space, but the best we could do is get info on consumer feelings around oral healthcare products like toothpaste, mouthwash, etc.
• If they offered a B2B version of this tool, that would be game changing.
• Affordability. Individual reports are quite expensive, but getting an annual subscription is probably also prohibitive for smaller businesses

Incentivized

• Mintel industry data has been the backbone of our agency's blog, email and marketing eblasts, which helps position us as a thought-leader.
• I can't say that Mintel stats single-handedly won some new business pitches for us, but adding Mintel stats to a pitch (especially one that we might be somewhat new to), has certainly strengthened our pitch and made us look like confident experts.
• when we've supported a client with a new product launch, we've used Mintel to develop an actionable plan about brand positioning, which claims to highlight and how their product will fit in the competitor landscape.

Incentivized