The European competition watchdog is attaching conditions to the merger between market research firms GfK and NielsenIQ announced last year. Therefore, GfK’s consumer panel will be put up for sale.
Overlap
Last year, market research firms GfK and NielsenIQ announced they would merge. A small landslide in the world of market research, we wrote back then, as both leading agencies specialise in consumer and shopper behaviour. Although they are also complementary, with NielsenIQ specialising in FMCG and GfK focusing on market data in technology and consumer durables.
According to the European Commission, however, the panel activities of GfK and NielsenIQ overlap too much. The competition authority sees the sale of GfK Consumer Panel’s global operations to an independent third party as the only solution to enable the merger between the two companies, reports Lebensmittel Zeitung. According to the German trade magazine, interest in the consumer panel is said to be high among both strategic and financial investors.
