Kantar

Kantar is a marketing data and analytics company organised into three areas: signal intelligence covering brand guidance, customer experience and survey services, decision intelligence covering creative testing, media effectiveness and innovation, and strategic intelligence covering brand strategy, sustainability and qualitative research.

BrandZ is the asset that distinguishes Kantar from newer entrants and it is worth understanding as more than a ranking. The annual valuation of the world's most valuable global brands is built on consumer research rather than on financial modelling alone, which makes it a published, repeated, comparable measurement of brand equity across decades. That history is a genuine barrier to entry: a brand tracker launched this year can tell you where a brand stands now, and cannot tell you what a comparable decline looked like in 2009.

The three-part structure describes how research actually gets used rather than how it is produced. Signal intelligence is continuous measurement, decision intelligence is testing a specific choice before committing to it, and strategic intelligence is the longer question of what the brand should be. Most vendors do one of these well; the argument for a full-service house is that the same evidence base supports all three.

Kantar Marketplace is the self-service route for teams wanting to run studies without a full engagement, and the company publishes extensive perspectives material including work on creator effectiveness and the annual brand valuation. AI is addressed as its own area. Rates are not published; the pricing route referenced in the captured page returns a 404, and engagements are quoted per project.