The Research Effectiveness Review 2026
92% of client-side research professionals say research in their organisation is effective. 85% have personally discovered it was wrong, misleading, or inaccurate.
Both figures come from the same respondents, answering the same questionnaire.
That contradiction is not an exception. It is the condition the industry operates within. And it is where this review begins.
What's inside?
The Research Effectiveness Review 2026 covers six chapters and ten findings - on what the industry believes about its own effectiveness, what it is doing with AI, where it places its trust, which methods it would fight to keep, and how it really feels about its agencies, trackers, and segmentations.
Ten findings. One industry holding confidence and doubt in the same hand.
The ten findings include:
- 92% say research is effective. 85% have found it to be wrong. Both numbers come from the same people.
- Senior leaders are 1.57x more likely than specialists to call research highly effective - and 2.73x more likely to say AI has significantly improved it.
- 93% of organisations are using AI in their research process. Only 39% say it has significantly improved insight quality. Adoption is not effectiveness.
- The industry trusts its own craft - data analysis and questionnaire design - more than it trusts what respondents tell it. Only 34% routinely do anything about that gap.
- Usability testing has the highest net love score in the study. Ethnography has the worst. AI-moderated interviews are the only method on both the most-overrated and most-underrated lists simultaneously.
- Technology vendors and data analytics firms have overtaken full-service research agencies as the two largest partner categories.
- 64% of brand tracker owners expect their setup to change or be questioned within two years. 72% of segmentation owners expect theirs to be redone or refreshed.
To read the full Research Effectiveness Review 2026, click HERE
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