ICM Research is a
public opinion research
An opinion poll, often simply referred to as a survey or a poll (although strictly a poll is an actual election) is a survey (human research), human research survey of public opinion from a particular sampling (statistics), sample. Opinion polls ...
company that was founded in 1989. ICM is a subsidiary of Creston Insight, a
marketing services
Marketing is the process of exploring, creating, and delivering value to meet the needs of a target market in terms of goods and services; potentially including selection of a target audience; selection of certain attributes or themes to empha ...
company, and is a member of the
British Polling Council
The British Polling Council (BPC) is an association of market research companies whose opinion polls are regularly published or broadcast in media in the United Kingdom.
The BPC was established in 2004, twelve years after the perceived failure ...
.
History
When ICM was initially established, the initialism represented "Independent Communications and Marketing". However, the full name was never used in practice, with the company simply being known as "ICM". It was founded by three people: Nick Sparrow, who reinvented opinion polling after the 1992 polling miss to common acclaim, Steve Parker who focused on retail research, and Kate Turner who conducted IT and telecoms research. All founders joined from Marplan, a market research company that ceased to exist just prior to ICM being set up.
FieldworkUK was set up as a face-to-face interviewing operation in 1999, followed by ICM Direct for telephone (and later, online data collection) in 2001.
ICM was sold to Creston Plc in 2008, after which the three founders left the business.
ICM Research re-branded in November 2014 to ICM Unlimited.
Research
ICM conducted polling research for media publications such as ''
The Guardian
''The Guardian'' is a British daily newspaper. It was founded in 1821 as ''The Manchester Guardian'', and changed its name in 1959. Along with its sister papers ''The Observer'' and ''The Guardian Weekly'', ''The Guardian'' is part of the Gu ...
'', ''
The Scotsman
''The Scotsman'' is a Scottish compact newspaper and daily news website headquartered in Edinburgh. First established as a radical political paper in 1817, it began daily publication in 1855 and remained a broadsheet until August 2004. Its par ...
'' and ''
The Sunday Telegraph
''The Sunday Telegraph'' is a British broadsheet newspaper, founded in February 1961 and published by the Telegraph Media Group, a division of Press Holdings.
It is the sister paper of ''The Daily Telegraph
''The Daily Telegraph'', kn ...
''. It was credited by the British Polling Council with the most accurate prediction of both the
1997
File:1997 Events Collage.png, From left, clockwise: The movie set of ''Titanic'', the highest-grossing movie in history at the time; ''Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone'', is published; Comet Hale-Bopp passes by Earth and becomes one of t ...
and
2001
The September 11 attacks against the United States by Al-Qaeda, which Casualties of the September 11 attacks, killed 2,977 people and instigated the global war on terror, were a defining event of 2001. The United States led a Participants in ...
General Elections, along with the
2010 General Election. Other notable correct predictions include the
2011 AV referendum which was correct to 1 decimal point and its published online and telephone polls before the 2016 EU referendum.
Like all polling companies, its prediction of the
2015 General Election was wrong, predicting a 1-point victory for Labour rather than the 7-point Conservative outcome.
The company has won various awards for its polling work, including both the Innovation in Research Methodology 2013 and the Market Research Society Silver Medal for Best Paper in the International Journal of Market Research (IJMR) 2013, won by Martin Boon" for his paper Predicting Elections - a Wisdom of Crowds Approach"; Nick Sparrow won the Silver Medal in 2007 for "Developing reliable online polls" and with John Turner in 1995/96 for "Messages from the spiral of silence: developing more accurate marketing information in a more uncertain political climate".
In 2014, research papers cover topics such as business banking,
mobile commerce
The term mobile commerce was originally coined in 1997 by Kevin Duffey at the launch of the Global Mobile Commerce Forum, to mean "the delivery of electronic commerce capabilities directly into the consumer’s hand, anywhere, via wireless techno ...
and retirement planning.
ICM was involved with the polling of the Scottish constituency in regard to the independence referendum poll that occurred on 18 September 2014. The
BBC #REDIRECT BBC #REDIRECT BBC
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...
published the research conducted by ICM, in addition to other polling firms, as part of its "poll tracker" in the lead-up to the vote which resulted in Scotland remaining part of the UK.