What businesses employ market analysts?

As a market research professional I'll try answering this question. Pretty much every company that sells a product has a market analyst. Almost every product you've ever heard of will have at least one market analyst working for that specific brand, and possibly a team. For instance, "Colgate Toothpaste" or "Quaker Oats" or "Tesla".

Maybe not at the startup stage, where the founder is doing the market analysis. But by the time a firm gets to reasonable revenue, it'll have some one full time working to understand customers, their purchase process, trends, competitors, etc.

I heard a presentation recently by Yankee Candle describing how they were started by a high schooler who melted crayons into a mason jar to create a Mother's Day present. The students friends bought some, then some stores did. After a few years, it was a real business with employees. Then they wanted to try new scents, new styles, get into different stores, and needed to find out what customers and suppliers thought. So they hired an analyst, and from there did all kinds of research -- talking to people in the malls, understanding who their competitors are, etc.

Further, many firms will often hire outside market analysts to help them. These can be individual experts, hired as consultants on a specific problem, like "Do our customers like concept A or concept B better?" or more analytic questions like "If we provide hot spot cell phone coverage, how many stadium-seats are there in the US and what percent have poor cell-phone coverage at peak capacity?"

That minimum might be $10 million per year, which from one perspective is a lot of money, but will be categorized as a "Small-to-Medium Business" in almost any market analysis. Smaller companies might have one individual works across all of their brands. Bigger companies might have a team for each brand and a research budget.

Firms and markets -- and thus market analysts -- are extremely diverse. You could work for a firm marketing its own product. You could work for a firm like Gartner or Forrester that has analysts who publish syndicated reports for all kinds of markets. You could work for a consumer packaged goods retailer or a global defense contractor. A friend works for a major university endowment projecting the value of forests globally.

The industries that employ the largest number of market research analysts were management of companies and enterprises; management, scientific, and technical consulting services; insurance carriers; credit intermediation and related activities; computer systems design and related services; marketing research and public opinion polling; software publishers; professional and commercial equipment and supplies merchant wholesalers; securities and commodity contracts intermediation and brokerage; and advertising and related services.

Hi Christopher,
I have had a lot of fun in the Market Analysis field over the years. My degree is in physics and the ability to understand and manipulate data has definitely been helpful in this field but it is the ability to use research to understand how people behave that really got me excited about this field. I have done market research in mostly for high-tech companies but it has covered many different market types, countries and customer types. Almost all companies will use market research and thus market analysts once they reach a reasonable size and have a stand alone marketing department.

All the best,
Jim