With the longest continuous heritage of any social research company in Britain, TNS-BMRB has, for over three quarters of a century, played a leading role in chronicling the changing social, political and business landscape of the UK.
Established in 1933, in the context of a surge of interest in social study, BMRB started as the research arm of advertising agency J.Walter Thompson who recognised the benefits of increasing their market knowledge by talking to their customers directly.
With the advent of the Second World War BMRB’s priorities shifted from observing commercial patterns to examining some of the social problems created by the war including rationing, workforce depletion and wartime communications.
In 1949 the company merged with Mass Observation, the innovative research movement of the same name, famous for its ethnographic approaches and the recording of long term personal diaries of members of the public during the war years.
In the years that followed, BMRB accumulated a portfolio of expertise that includes some of the most important national statistics surveys, such as the British Crime Survey, Taking Part, and the Citizenship Survey.
The pioneering spirit of our founders remained with us, and in recent times BMRB continued to lead the field: with the application of deliberative methodologies in public consultation; applied behaviour change theory in public communications; and in 2007, with the launch of the Institute for Insight in the Public Services.
In 2009, following the acquisition of TNS by our parent group, BMRB was able to join forces with TNS Social Research. TNS has social and political research units in every continent of the globe and TNS-BMRB now sits proudly within this truly international team of experts.