Kantar reviews

Unsustainable work/life balance. Though the average MaPSter is bright and hard working, the culture and managers expect workaholics. You will be tied to your email when you are away from work or on vacation, and by consultant level you start to feel guilty for not looking at work on the weekend. People who are successful at MaPS are motivated for the quality of their work, at the expense of an outside life. This results in embitterment and sad-laughing at your situation among the junior staff. Analysts and Consultants are seen as expendable. Large turnover and are placing many people on performance tracks. The review and advisor process is a crapshoot. Depending on your reviewer/advisor, reviews and promotions can be determined solely by your relationship with a project manager, not taking into account the opinions of your peer team mates. Day to day is not interesting, and you rarely see the impact of your work. 100% of research is surveys, which are boring and outdated. Survey testing will become the bane of your existence. Some projects are just pumping out numbers without thought, which makes the day to day tedious. Too much of the company's portfolio is brand tracking work which are not very interesting or intellectually challenging. Aside from excel, most analysis is done through a program called Marketsight, which no other company uses and does not place you at a competitive advantage. If you're looking at MB Analytics in hopes to get into the Millward Brown/ Kantar/ WPP system, know that management will actively dissuade you, and HR from internally transferring. They are taking on more and more lower profile clients in their attempt to expand, reducing the value of the MaPS offering. Finally, due to the solely quantitative nature of the project, I foresee the market research industry being dominated by deep-learning tech algorithms that will reduce the need for analysts and consultants. If the company is smart they will invest in their internal tech.

1. Poor management - project managers are promoted without any leadership qualifications 2. Hierarchical structure - decisions are often justified with "the Partner/Director said so" 3. Tedious tasks - I was asked by a partner to drive 20+ miles to find a Wal-Mart receipt 4. Stubbornly process-oriented - inside-the-box thinking 5. Work-life balance - pick any review here and you will find some mention of this If I could describe this company in 1 word, it would be: anti-startup. The only similarity is the number of hours worked…there are lots of politics involved, decisions made and orders given without explanation, and if you challenge the status quo, even with logic, people will pull rank to oppose you. Make no mistake, it's a consulting firm, and as many others have pointed out, be prepared to stay past 7,8,9,10... several nights of the week or several weeks/months at a time. The culture is all about working at any/all points of the day & weekends - which is why they give you nice iPhone 6's to check email with. Oftentimes the work is extremely tedious (checking numbers, copying/pasting data, formatting slides) and can be automated if the company just realizes that maybe the stubborn processes in place should be updated once in a while. However, the bigger underlying issue is the management structure in place. My biggest complaint is that most project managers (PM) are horrible at managing client expectations. The majority of most clients' relationships with MaPS can be illustrated like this: 1) Client orders MaPS to do "A" (which can be illogical at times) 2)MaPS does "A" with very little pushback and no questions asked 3) Client changes their mind and wants "B" (and gives no additional time) 4) MaPS scrambles frantically to do "B" in effort to appease client. This continues, except the next time through the client wants more, and so the junior staff ends up working more, and so on… Worst of all, if/when the client doesn't renew with MaPS the team is blamed for not performing well, and this is unfairly reflected on the career/project review.