• by Gavin O'Malley  @mp_gavin, August 7, 2012

Market research newcomer Qualtrics wants to help every brand build its own market research and real-time marketing engine.  That’s the thinking behind Site Intercept -- a just-debuted tool, which Qualtrics and its investors are betting will upend more established market researchers.
 
“Site Intercept empowers marketers to be creative and flexible, and create real-time custom Web content and gather data on the fly -- without relying on IT,” said Ryan Smith, CEO of Qualtrics.
 
Site Intercept can be programmed to measure anything from visitors’ geo-location to visit history to shopping cart content. It lets brands display custom messages, surveys, promotions and other content to get immediate feedback.
 
Entirely point-and-click and drag-and-drop, the interface includes nine types of creative intercepts that brands can use to interact with customers, including pop-overs, pop-unders, customer embedded content and A/B testing.
 
The launch comes just months after Accel Partners and Sequoia Capital pumped $70 million in the so-called software-as-a-service product offering.
 
Qualtrics offers an online platform for gathering market intelligence and insights in real-time.
 
Founded in 2008, Qualtrics clients include Barnes & Noble, CVS Caremark, GEICO, Microsoft, Neiman Marcus, Royal Caribbean, Southwest Airlines, Thomson Reuters, Toyota, Vodafone and Zappos.
 
A recent survey of 1,021 technology experts and stakeholders conducted by the Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project and Elon University’s Imagining and Internet Center found that most (53%) believe the emergence of Big Data is likely to be a “huge positive for society in nearly all respects” by 2020. Yet, a significant minority (39%) contended that it’s likely to be “a big negative.”