Kantar unifies under a single brand name in India and across the world
Following months of efforts to unify a number of its brands, global research and consulting firm Kantar has announced that it will operate solely as Kantar as of April this year. The brands being unified include Kantar Worldpanel and Kantar TNS, both of which are particularly active in India.
The unification applies to Kantar’s operations across the globe, which entails the consolidation of a number of its sub-brands such as Kantar Consulting, kantar Health, Kantar IMRB, Kantar Media, Kantar Millward Brown, Kantar Public, Kantar TNS, Kantar Worldpanel and Lightspeed.
The firm is based in London, and utilises this wide array of brands to offer services in a number of domains, including research, analytics, marketing and healthcare advisory. The firm’s clients include a number of high profile firms across the globe, including half of the Fortune 500 firms.
In addition to leaders of the private sector, Kantar’s services also cater to small and medium enterprises, the public sector, the media industry and a number of NGOs. Since 2016, the firm has gradually been merging its practices around the world to come under a single brand.
In India, Kantar brought the back end operations of TNS, Millward Brown and IMRB into one practice in 2016, following which Kantar’s parent company WPP merged its media and advertising subsidiary GroupM with Kantar to form a global Kantar Analytics Practice last year.
Similar individual mergers have been unfolding across the globe, taking the total number of sub brands operating under the Kantar name from 18 in 2016 to 9 last year. The merger is valid for all of Kantar’s brands that operate in India as well, which excludes Kantar Media that had not yet entered the market.
“The change in our branding reflects the operational changes already happening across our company, and is driven by a desire to achieve simplicity, scale and impact for our clients. This one change will make Kantar easier for clients to understand and work with,” said Eric Salama, CEO of Kantar.
“Together, Kantar understands more about how people think, feel, shop, share, vote and view than any other company. Simplifying our brand strategy is a subtle, but important signal of our evolution and our mission – inspiring the world’s most important organisations by providing the most complete understanding of the people they serve,” added, Mandy Pooler, CMO of Kantar.
