Mintel vs. User Interviews

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

Good: - When one needs to recruit participants for User research fast. It’s particularly fast when someone doesn’t need niche sample - bad: - n/a (it’s difficult for me to say when I’m using it for 3 years with multiple clients and I’m a researcher. User interview does what I need)

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

User Testing: - UI has the great feature of double screening that you can really select your participants based on the research requirements and they are not approved automatically.

Therefore not every question in the screener needs to be filtering.

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