A US firm launched a cake mix in England that required adding an egg, assuming British housewives wanted to feel involved. The product failed because the British preferred tough, spongy cakes for afternoon tea, proving that US-based research could not be directly applied without local market research.
In 2016, Nielsen, founded in 1923, was the world's top marketing research company. It generated a massive worldwide research revenue of $6,309.0 million and employed 9,646 full-time employees from its US headquarters.
According to industry estimates, the American supermarket chain Walmart collects approximately 2.5 petabytes (equivalent to 2,500,000 gigabytes) of transaction, location, and customer behavior data every single hour.
Technological projections indicate that the 'Internet of Things' (IoT) will soon connect over 20 billion devices worldwide, creating an unprecedented volume of continuous external data for companies to integrate into their MKIS.
In 2013, German consumers discovered that Mercedes-Benz cars equipped with 'Active Parking Assist' could automatically tweet spotted empty parking spaces with geo-tags to assist other drivers in finding parking spots.
In 2013, the refusal rate for telephone surveys in the United States reached over 60 percent. Furthermore, 49 percent of those who did participate stated that they found the survey questions to be too personal, highlighting respondent abuse.