InSites Consulting in New York, a leading consumer insight and collaboration agency, has announced the acquisition of Gongos Inc. in Royal Oak, a customer-centricity consultancy. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.
With more than 30 years of experience, Gongos is a research agency that enables consumer-centric growth through building consumer understanding and transforming organizational behavior.
InSites Consulting further strengthens its global footprint through the collaboration, and takes a big step toward achieving its goal to be recognized as the global leader in helping brands become more consumer-centric.
Gongos, launched in 1991, focuses on consumer research within the automotive industry and gradually branched out to retail, consumer packaged goods, financial services, and health care.
When founder John Gongos unexpectedly passed away in 2012, Camille Nicita took over as owner and was appointed president and CEO, steering the agency’s focus toward making customer centricity its leading objective.
Today, Gongos has 125 employees, has a Fortune 500 client list across multiple industries, including Coca-Cola, Mars Petcare, Kellogg’s, U.S. Bank, UnitedHealthcare, and General Motors Co., and was recognized as a ‘Small Giant’ in Forbes’ 2020 List of America’s Best Small Companies.
The acquisition of Gongos marks a major milestone for InSites Consulting’s buy-and-build strategy. With Gongos ranked No. 47 among the U.S. largest market research organizations, InSites Consulting significantly reinforces its position on the domestic market next to its existing New York presence since 2012.
It also helps accelerate its path toward becoming the leading consumer-centricity agency, with Gongos’ practice in helping Fortune-500 companies become more customer-centric.
“As we aim to be a truly global agency supporting brands all around the world, having a solid presence in the U.S. market is a necessary condition for success,” says Kristof De Wulf, co-founder and CEO of InSites Consulting.
“We could not have wished for a better cultural and strategic fit, with Gongos sharing a similar set of values, embracing insight communities as one of their leading methods, and setting the customer-centricity agenda for large brands and organizations.”
With Gongos now part of InSites Consulting, it can offer its clients access to InSites Consulting’s award-winning Square (an insight community technology), its creative crowdsourcing capability eÿeka, and its cultural insight, trends and brand transformation practice that was reinforced by the recent acquisition of Space Doctors.
Gongos also offers a patent-pending Value Exchange (Vex) Model. Vex identifies pathways for customer-centric growth by linking customer goals with business outcomes driven by Customer Performance Indicators (CPIs). In October 2021, Gongos announced the first annual Vex Awards at the North American Customer Centricity Awards.
“Gongos’ customer-centric mission is to empower brands to build reciprocal value exchange with consumers, ultimately driving profitability and growth for corporations through the fulfillment of customer needs,” says Nicita, president and CEO of Gongos. “We can now take that ambition to a global scale, and our clients will greatly benefit from this cross-fertilization. We are eager to start this next chapter in our growth journey together with InSites Consulting.”
Moving forward, Nicita becomes the group’s managing director North America and, as a shareholder of InSites Consulting, will contribute to the global strategy formulation process by joining its global Partner Board.
Building on the experience Gongos has built over the years, she will also play an instrumental role in setting up a global expert team around internal transformation, intended to inspire, engage, and activate business stakeholders around consumers. With Gongos joining, InSites Consulting now has more than 800 people across 20 locations, generating € +100M in revenues.
For more information about Gongos, visit gongos.com.
Founded in 1997, InSites Consulting is a consumer centricity agency and global market leader in online insight communities. With a team of more than 650 employees across 19 offices, the company states it makes consumer-centric decision making a reality for over a third of the world’s leading brands, including Estée Lauder, Ferrero, GSK, L’Oréal, Mars, Mondelez, Nestlé, and Philips.
Our insight management platform and versatile toolbox allow brands to become truly immersed in the consumer reality. By uniting brands and consumers around the world, fostering collaboration and consumer empathy, we can shape the future better, together.
For more information, visit insites-consulting.com.
