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Market research analysts

Official title Market Research Analysts and Marketing Specialists (SOC 13-1161)

Also called Marketing analyst, Consumer insights analyst, Consumer insights manager, Market intelligence analyst, Marketing specialist

In brief

In May 2025, BLS counted 899,580 US market research analysts, with median pay of $78,760 a year. Of the BLS counts since 2012, the May 2025 count is the highest. The earliest figure here is an estimate of 2,000 from 1930, not measured the same way as today's count. The last full technology era for market research analysts: Big data + predictive analytics, 2015 to 2023.

What the sources say

Official outlook

BLS projects employment to grow 7% from 2025 to 2035.

BLS Employment Projections 2025-35

AI exposure studies

Data as of BLS OEWS May 2025; BLS Employment Projections 2025-35. BLS publishes these counts as yearly survey snapshots and cautions against reading them as a precise trend. In May 2021 BLS changed how it estimates these counts (a model-based method using three years of survey data) and moved fully to the 2018 occupation codes, so part of a change across 2021 can come from the method rather than the work.

Last updated .

Cite this page
APA

Future History. (2026, October 11). Market research analysts: jobs and pay since 1930 [Data set; data as of BLS OEWS May 2025; BLS Employment Projections 2025-35]. https://futurehistory.earth/timeline/13-1161

Chicago

Future History. "Market research analysts: jobs and pay since 1930." Data as of BLS OEWS May 2025; BLS Employment Projections 2025-35. Last modified October 11, 2026. https://futurehistory.earth/timeline/13-1161.

BibTeX

@misc{futurehistory_13_1161, author = {{Future History}}, title = {Market research analysts: jobs and pay since 1930}, year = {2026}, month = oct, howpublished = {\url{https://futurehistory.earth/timeline/13-1161}}, note = {Last updated 2026-10-11. Data as of BLS OEWS May 2025; BLS Employment Projections 2025-35}, }

The access date is today's date on your device.

drag to travel through time
1925195019752000now
Country
2026
Known then as Commercial Researcher / Market Analyst (pioneer era)
Known then as Market Researcher / Marketing Research Analyst (scientific polling era)
Known then as Marketing Research Analyst / Consumer Research Analyst (postwar expansion era)
Known then as Market Research Analyst (BLS 13-1161, pre-merger code)
Known then as Market Research Analysts and Marketing Specialists (BLS SOC 13-1161, current combined code)
Known today as Market Research Analysts and Marketing Specialists (BLS SOC 13-1161, current combined code)
Projected to still be called Market Research Analysts and Marketing Specialists (BLS SOC 13-1161, current combined code)
Data from the May 2025 survey
US Employment
900K
Est.

Stated in source: BLS OEWS

Official statistic
Report an error
Median Annual Wage
$78,760
Est.

≈ $76,741 in 2024 prices (derived by us, CPI-adjusted)

Official statistic
Report an error
Beat · 1911

Charles Coolidge Parlin is appointed Manager of the Commercial Research Division at Curtis Publishing Company in Philadelphia -- the first dedicated market research function in any American corporation. Parlin had no job title because the work had never been done before; he invented the phrase "commercial research" to describe it. His first project, a 900-page study of the US farm equipment market, set the template for evidence-based advertising decisions. Parlin is now recognized as the father of marketing research.

Beat · 1923

Arthur C. Nielsen founds the A.C. Nielsen Company in Chicago, initially providing engineering performance surveys for industrial machinery. Over the next decade, Nielsen pivots to consumer product measurement, creating the Drug Index (1933) and the Food Index (1934) -- the first systematic retail measurement services in the United States. Nielsen coins the concept of "market share" in the process of building these indices, giving manufacturers a common language for competitive position that remains foundational to the profession.

Beat · 1935

George Gallup founds the American Institute of Public Opinion in Princeton, New Jersey, and conducts his first scientific consumer surveys. In the 1936 presidential election, Gallup correctly predicts Franklin Roosevelt's win using a sample of only a few thousand respondents -- while the Literary Digest poll, using two million mail-in ballots, incorrectly predicts Alfred Landon. The Gallup method proves that representative sampling, not raw volume, is what makes a poll reliable. The demonstration has an immediate and lasting effect on market research practice: probability sampling becomes the professional standard.

Beat · 1937

The American Marketing Association (AMA) is founded, consolidating the National Association of Marketing Teachers and the American Marketing Society. The AMA will become the primary professional body for marketing research practitioners, establishing standards, ethics codes, and credentialing programs that formalize market research as a recognized profession distinct from general marketing management.

Beat · 1964

Paul Green at the Wharton School begins developing conjoint analysis -- a mathematical technique for modeling how consumers make trade-off decisions among product attributes. Green will publish foundational conjoint papers through the 1970s, and the method will become one of the most widely used quantitative tools in commercial market research for the next five decades, used for product design, pricing research, and competitive strategy. Conjoint analysis is the market research profession's most durable methodological contribution to applied economics.

Beat · 1999

SurveyMonkey launches in 1999, founded by Ryan and Chris Finley after Ryan sought a simple tool to collect feedback and found nothing accessible. SurveyMonkey bootstraps its growth entirely on subscription revenue until Spectrum Equity and Bain Capital acquire a majority stake in 2009. By 2012, SurveyMonkey has over 25 million surveys created per month. The platform transforms survey fielding from a research-firm activity requiring specialist software and phone panels into something any manager can do in an afternoon -- permanently altering the pricing and positioning of the professional market research industry.

Beat · 2010

The 2010 SOC revision combines Market Research Analysts (the traditional occupation) with Marketing Specialists into a single combined code: 13-1161. This reflects a structural change in the profession that had been building through the 2000s: digital marketing analytics specialists, SEO analysts, email marketing managers, and social media researchers had emerged as a distinct workforce that used research methods but operated inside marketing departments. The combined code produces a substantially larger headcount than either predecessor category alone -- by 2024, more than three times the pre-2010 estimates of roughly 200,000-250,000 for the narrower market research analyst category.

Beat · 2025

Qualtrics' 2025 market research industry survey finds that 62% of professional market researchers have already used AI-generated synthetic data in their work, and 71% believe synthetic data will constitute the majority of research within three years. Outset.ai raises a $30 million Series B in December 2025 to scale AI-moderated qualitative interviewing. The global market research industry reaches $140 billion in 2024, up from $102 billion in 2021 -- a 37% expansion during the same three-year period when AI adoption was most intense. The data suggest AI is, so far, expanding the market rather than contracting it.

How to read this number

OEWS is a point-in-time survey snapshot, not a continuous time series; BLS advises against using it for year-over-year trend comparison.

Each dot is a cited figure over time; the dotted line only links them (values between aren't measured). Hollow dots are estimates.

Official statistic: Copied by a script from a statistics agency table or a published study's table, not retyped by hand. BLS figures and the forecast and exposure tables are also re-checked against that table on every data run. Researched context: Researched from the cited source rather than copied from it by a script, so it is not machine-checked yet. Spot a mistake? Each figure has a “Report an error” link.

Cited forecasts · present → 2035

Will AI replace market research analysts? What the research says

Each figure is stated by the named source; we publish no forecasts of our own. Where sources disagree, we show the disagreement rather than an average.

Each figure is stated by the named source; we publish no forecasts of our own. Where sources disagree, the spread is the honest signal.

What published forecasts say
Forecast change in the number of people doing this work, as published by each named source. Bars share one scale on every role, centred on zero and reaching the end at ±30%. Grey marks a small change, 3% or less either way.
BLS Employment Projections 2025-35
→ 2035
+7%
BLS National Employment Matrix, 2025-35 cycle, line for SOC 13-1161 (Market research analysts and marketing specialists): 952.7 thousand jobs in 2025, projected 1,019.0 thousand in 2035, a change of +66.3 thousand (+7.0%). Matrix employment counts all jobs in the occupation, including self-employed workers (3.8% of this occupation in 2025). The average for all occupations in this cycle is +3.5%.
Official statisticReport an error
How exposed is this work to AI (research measures)
Scores as published by each study. Each row says what it measures. These measure what AI could technically do, not forecasts of jobs lost.
Eloundou et al. (2023), "GPTs are GPTs"
2023 study · Share of tasks exposed to LLMs (β, human-rated)
57.7%
of tasks
What this measures

Published occupation-level exposure from the paper's occ_level.csv for O*NET-SOC 13-1161.00 Market Research Analysts and Marketing Specialists. Shown: human-rated β = 0.577, the share of the occupation's tasks an LLM could do in at least half the time at equal quality, counting tasks that need LLM-powered software at half weight (β = E1 + 0.5 × E2). Other published measures for this occupation: human-rated α (LLM alone) 0.231 and γ (all LLM-assisted) 0.923; GPT-4-rated β 0.5. This measures how much of the work an LLM could touch, not how many jobs disappear.

Official statisticReport an error
Today, in this role

What's changing day to day for market research analysts

Three parts of your work where AI is already doing real lifting, and what stays yours.

AI is sitting alongside you hereDirect AI-assisted open-ended response analysis using platforms like Yabble, defining the theme taxonomy and sentiment dimensions before fielding, reviewing AI-generated theme clusters and verbatim bucketing for accuracy, identifying edge-case responses that don't fit automated categories, and translating coded themes into a business-relevant insight narrative.

Direct AI-assisted open-ended response analysis using platforms like Yabble, defining the theme taxonomy and sentiment dimensions before fielding, reviewing AI-generated theme clusters and verbatim bucketing for accuracy, identifying edge-case responses that don't fit automated categories, and translating coded themes into a business-relevant insight narrative.[9],[10],[7]

Where your edge is

AI coding tools like Yabble Count work 1000x faster than human coders and have replaced the bulk of manual open-ended tabulation. Your leverage is upstream (defining the taxonomy that shapes what the AI finds) and downstream (interpreting what the clustered themes mean for the business decision). Build skills in thematic analysis and grounded theory: the frameworks that tell you whether AI-surfaced patterns are noise or signal.

AI is sitting alongside you hereManage the brand's social listening program using Brandwatch Iris AI, configuring query logic and Boolean filters for brand, competitor, and category monitoring across 100M+ sources, interpreting Iris-generated sentiment spike alerts in business context, identifying emerging consumer pain points and cultural moments from AI-surfaced conversation clusters, and translating findings into quarterly brand health reports for the marketing leadership team.

Manage the brand's social listening program using Brandwatch Iris AI, configuring query logic and Boolean filters for brand, competitor, and category monitoring across 100M+ sources, interpreting Iris-generated sentiment spike alerts in business context, identifying emerging consumer pain points and cultural moments from AI-surfaced conversation clusters, and translating findings into quarterly brand health reports for the marketing leadership team.[11],[12],[2]

Tools picking this up
Where your edge is

Iris AI now handles the continuous monitoring and anomaly alerting that once required daily manual pulls. Your leverage is in interpreting what the spikes mean: is this a real brand crisis or an isolated meme? Is this competitor sentiment shift a temporary campaign bump or a structural positioning gain? Build skills in applied discourse analysis and cultural context: the "so what" layer that distinguishes an insight from a data point.

AI is sitting alongside you hereRun the competitive intelligence program using Crayon, configuring the signal-collection scope across competitor websites, job postings, pricing pages, and press releases

Run the competitive intelligence program using Crayon, configuring the signal-collection scope across competitor websites, job postings, pricing pages, and press releases; reviewing AI-generated Sparks summaries for strategic relevance; enriching automated battlecards with proprietary context (win/loss interview data, sales team field intelligence); and translating competitive signals into quarterly positioning recommendations for the product and sales leadership teams.[13],[2]

Tools picking this up
Where your edge is

Crayon's Sparks AI now automates the collection and initial synthesis that once took analysts a few days per competitor per quarter. Your differentiation is the proprietary context AI cannot access: win/loss interview themes, what sales reps hear in deals, and the organizational intelligence about why competitors are making the moves they're making. The battlecard is the commodity; the strategic interpretation is the moat.

Where market research analysts go next

Natural next steps for someone with your foundation: not exits, evolutions.

What each move takes

A direction you could grow

Marketing Managers

Senior market research analysts who shape the research agenda and regularly present findings to marketing leadership already operate at the edge of this role. The pivot formalizes the shift from "supplier of intelligence" to "owner of marketing strategy", adding budget accountability, team management, and agency/vendor oversight. Analysts who have built strong relationships with marketing stakeholders and understand how insights translate into campaign decisions are best positioned for this move. The primary skill gap is direct P&L ownership and the political navigation of cross-functional marketing leadership.

What you'd add
· Marketing performance attribution and ROI frameworks (MMM, multi-touch)
· AI marketing tool fluency: HubSpot Breeze, Adobe GenStudio, Salesforce Einstein
What it takesSome new skills to pick up
Tools of the era

How has the work of market research analysts changed since 1911?

The tools that defined the work, one line per era. Select an era to see how it reshaped the work.

  • Field interview + ledger tabulation (the Parlin era)

    Charles Coolidge Parlin's first market research at Curtis Publishing in 1911 used no specialized technology: researchers traveled to meet dealers, distributors, and consumers, recorded observations in notebooks, and tabulated results by hand in ledgers. The research product was a narrative report, not a statistical table. Daniel Starch perfected this manual approach with door-to-door "readership studies" that asked households whether they recalled seeing specific advertisements. The entire analytic toolbox was a pencil, a ledger, and a travel budget.

  • Scientific probability sampling + mail and telephone panels (Gallup era)

    George Gallup's American Institute of Public Opinion (1935) brought statistical sampling theory to consumer research: a properly drawn random sample of a few thousand respondents could represent the views of millions. This was a genuine methodological revolution, not just a tools upgrade. For the market research analyst, it meant that systematic survey design and statistical inference became core professional skills. Arthur Nielsen's 1936 acquisition of the Audimeter and his creation of the Nielsen Drug Index (1933) and Food Index (1934) industrialized retail measurement. The primary field instruments were the telephone interview (WATS lines from the 1940s) and the mailed questionnaire.

    Effect on the work

    Scientific sampling dramatically expanded the scope and credibility of market research, creating sustained demand for research professionals throughout the 1940s and 1950s. Large consumer goods companies built in-house research departments; independent firms like Nielsen, Gallup, Roper, and later Burke grew into significant employers.

  • Computer-assisted data processing + CATI (IBM mainframes and the conjoint era)

    IBM mainframe computers arrived in corporate research departments in the 1960s, transforming the analysis phase of the research cycle. Punch-card tabulation replaced hand-tabulation, reducing the time from fieldwork completion to results from weeks to days. Paul Green's development of conjoint analysis at Wharton in the early 1970s gave analysts a rigorous mathematical tool for modeling consumer preference trade-offs. Computer-Assisted Telephone Interviewing (CATI) software, emerging in the mid-1970s, automated the interviewer's question routing, reduced data-entry error, and allowed real-time quota monitoring. By 1980, a market researcher at a major consumer goods company wielded a fundamentally different analytic toolkit than a researcher of 1960.

    Effect on the work

    Computer-aided analysis increased researcher productivity sharply, allowing smaller teams to process larger studies. It also raised the technical bar for entry: statistical fluency and some computing proficiency became expected qualifications by the mid-1970s, gradually professionalizing the occupation above its earlier roots in journalism and general business.

  • PC spreadsheets + SPSS / SAS (desktop statistical analysis era)

    The arrival of Lotus 1-2-3 (1983) and later Microsoft Excel, combined with desktop statistical packages like SPSS and SAS, put powerful quantitative tools on every analyst's desk. Research that had required mainframe turnaround and IT scheduling could now run on a PC overnight. Focus group facilities expanded in every major US city through the 1980s; Ernest Dichter's qualitative methodology, pioneered in the 1950s, became a standard complement to quantitative surveys. The analyst's day-to-day work shifted toward interpretation -- building crosstabs, running regressions, preparing PowerPoint presentations for brand teams -- rather than the earlier mechanical tabulation.

  • Online surveys + internet panels (SurveyMonkey 1999, web analytics, social listening)

    SurveyMonkey launched in 1999 and within a decade had fundamentally democratized survey research: any brand manager, product manager, or startup founder could field a survey without a research firm. Online panels (Toluna, Survey Sampling International, Greenfield Online) replaced expensive telephone interviewing for most quantitative work. Web analytics tools (Omniture, Google Analytics from 2005) gave marketers behavioral data at a scale and granularity impossible via survey alone. Social media listening emerged as a category after Twitter (2006) and Facebook's growth -- platforms like Radian6 (2006) and Brandwatch (2007) let analysts monitor consumer conversation in real time. The research analyst's role bifurcated: the execution layer (programming surveys, running panels) became cheaper and more accessible, raising pressure on research agency billing rates; the insight and synthesis layer became more valuable as the data volume requiring interpretation grew.

    Effect on the work

    Online research dramatically reduced the cost and time of survey fieldwork, contributing to a structural shift away from large telephone research organizations and toward in-house corporate research teams equipped with self-service platforms. Research firm headcounts at traditional firms (Ipsos, TNS, Synovate) contracted while corporate insight teams at technology companies (Google, Facebook, Amazon) grew rapidly.

  • Big data + predictive analytics (behavioral data, customer data platforms, NPS systems)

    The mid-2010s brought a new source of competitive advantage for research analysts: first-party behavioral data. E-commerce companies, streaming services, and mobile apps accumulated purchase histories, clickstream records, and session logs that dwarfed anything survey research could produce. Customer data platforms (Salesforce, Adobe) and data warehouses (Snowflake, BigQuery) made behavioral data accessible to analytics teams. Fred Reichheld's Net Promoter Score, introduced in 2003, became nearly universal as a customer experience tracking metric by 2015. The research analyst role split further: quantitative specialists moved toward Python, R, and SQL; qualitative specialists moved toward ethnographic methods and customer journey mapping; a growing "insights manager" tier focused on synthesizing behavioral, survey, and qualitative data for business decisions.

  • Generative AI platforms (Quantilope quinn, Qualtrics Edge, Outset.ai, Brandwatch Iris AI)

    AI-powered research platforms launched in 2023-2025 compressed the execution layer of market research from weeks to hours. Quantilope's quinn AI co-pilot selects and configures advanced survey methods. Qualtrics Edge Audiences completes research that previously took weeks in minutes and cuts costs by 70%. Outset.ai conducts hundreds of simultaneous AI-moderated depth interviews in languages. Anthropic's observed exposure measure (Massenkoff and McCrory, March 2026), which combines what LLMs could theoretically speed up with automated, work-related Claude usage, ranks Market Research Analysts and Marketing Specialists fifth of all the occupations it covers. It describes task coverage in sampled usage, not a forecast of jobs. BLS projects 7% employment growth through 2034: the platform does the execution, the analyst owns the study design and strategic synthesis.

    Effect on the work

    AI platforms are compressing the research cycle and reducing the labor content of data collection, tabulation, and initial analysis. The occupation is bifurcating further: junior analysts whose primary role was executing surveys and producing cross-tab reports face genuine displacement pressure; senior analysts who own the research agenda, design novel methodologies, and synthesize cross-stream insights into business strategy are gaining leverage. Whether AI-driven cost compression grows the total market enough to offset displacement of execution-focused roles is the open empirical question through 2034.

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Market Research Analysts and Marketing Specialists employment and pay by year

On record since1911
Latest US employment899,580 (May 2025)Source: BLS OEWS May 2025Official statisticReport an error
Latest US median pay$78,760 (May 2025)Source: BLS OEWS May 2025Official statisticReport an error
Outlook+7% by 2035Source: BLS Employment Projections 2025-35Official statisticReport an error

In other countries

The latest figure each country's statistics agency publishes for this job. Each uses its own occupation definition, survey basis and currency, so the numbers are not directly comparable with each other or with the US figures.

  • United Kingdom (UK SOC 3554)

    Employment, 2025
    133,000, ONS ASHE 2025 Official statistic Report an errorONS Annual Survey of Hours and Earnings (Table 14): employee jobs in SOC 3554 Marketing associate professionals, United Kingdom, 2025 (ASHE "number of jobs", thousands x1000; excludes self-employment). Open Government Licence v3.0.
    Median pay, 2025
    £30,479, ONS ASHE 2025 Official statistic Report an errorONS Annual Survey of Hours and Earnings (Table 14.7a): median gross annual pay for all employee jobs in SOC 3554 Marketing associate professionals, United Kingdom, 2025. Open Government Licence v3.0.

  • Australia (ANZSCO 2251)

    Employment, 2025
    101,200, ABS Labour Force Survey Official statistic Report an errorABS Labour Force Survey (Detailed), table EQ08: employed persons in ANZSCO 2251 Advertising and Marketing Professionals, national (summed across sex and state/territory), annual average of 4 quarterly estimates.
    Median pay, 2025
    A$101,764, ABS Employee Earnings May 2025 Official statistic Report an errorAnnualised (x52) from A$1,957 median weekly earnings. ABS Survey of Employee Earnings and Hours, May 2025: median pay for full-time non-managerial employees paid at the adult rate, before tax. Surfaced via the Jobs and Skills Australia occupation profile.
View all 21 years of cited US data, each linked to its source
YearUS employmentAnnual pay (median unless marked)SourceReport
19302,000n/aEst., Wikipedia Researched contextReport
195015,000$4,200Est., The Origins of Marketing Research (employment) Researched contextEst., University of Missouri Libraries (pay) Researched contextReport
197045,000$12,000Est., The 100-Year History of Market Research (employment) Researched contextEst., University of Missouri Libraries (pay) Researched contextReport
1990120,000n/aEst., BLS Researched contextReport
2000200,000n/aEst., SurveyMonkey Researched contextReport
2010261,780$60,570BLS OEWS May 2010 Official statisticReport
2011318,190$60,250BLS OEWS May 2011 Official statisticReport
2012392,740$60,300BLS OEWS May 2012 Official statisticReport
2013430,350$60,800BLS OEWS May 2013 Official statisticReport
2014468,160$61,290BLS OEWS May 2014 Official statisticReport
2015506,420$62,150BLS OEWS May 2015 Official statisticReport
2016558,630$62,560BLS OEWS May 2016 Official statisticReport
2017596,450$63,230BLS OEWS May 2017 Official statisticReport
2018638,200$63,120BLS OEWS May 2018 Official statisticReport
2019678,500$63,790BLS OEWS May 2019 Official statisticReport
2020690,160$65,810BLS OEWS May 2020 Official statisticReport
2021727,540$63,920BLS OEWS May 2021 Official statisticReport
2022798,620$68,230BLS OEWS May 2022 Official statisticReport
2023846,370$74,680BLS OEWS May 2023 Official statisticReport
2024861,140$76,950BLS OEWS May 2024 Official statisticReport
2025899,580$78,760BLS OEWS May 2025 Official statisticReport
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