Echo Research
Echo Research is a London-based research and media-measurement company specialising in reputation and communications evaluation. Established at the end of the 1980s — company accounts variously give 1989 and 1990 as its founding year — it helps corporate and public-sector clients to measure how they are perceived, to evaluate the effectiveness of their communications and to understand the stakeholders who shape their reputations. Its services combine media monitoring and content analysis with market and stakeholder research, reputation audits and reputation valuation. The company states that it serves more than 700 clients worldwide, operates in the world's most widely spoken languages and employs a team of around eighty staff and analysts across offices in London and New York. Between 2011 and the early 2020s Echo was part of the Ebiquity group before being bought back by its former leader Sandra Macleod and resuming independent operation under the Echo Research name. It also runs Britain's Most Admired Companies, described as the United Kingdom's longest-running corporate reputation survey, and in 2024 it acquired Reputation Dividend, a specialist in valuing reputational assets.
Foundation and early development
Echo Research was established in 1989 or 1990, at a time when systematic evaluation of public relations and media coverage was still a young discipline in Britain. Organisations had long bought press cuttings, but turning coverage and stakeholder opinion into structured evidence about reputation — measured consistently over time and benchmarked against competitors — was a newer proposition. Echo built its business in that space, describing its role as providing clients with a clear and objective "echo" of how they were perceived: the perceptions and expectations held by the media, customers, investors, regulators and other audiences whose views determine whether an organisation is trusted. Early company descriptions emphasised impartiality and method, combining established research techniques with expert analysis to produce high-level reports for boards and communications teams. That positioning — independent measurement rather than advocacy — has remained central to the company's identity, and it is reflected in its status as a registered expert witness on reputation in courts of law, a role that requires its methods to withstand legal scrutiny.
Services
Echo's work falls into several connected strands. Reputation audits assess how an organisation is regarded by its key audiences and which factors drive that judgement. Media monitoring and analysis examine the volume, tone, content and impact of press, broadcast and online coverage, allowing clients to see not just how much coverage they received but what it said and whether it mattered. Market and stakeholder research surveys the groups an organisation depends on — customers, employees, investors, policymakers, communities and non-governmental organisations — while issues and risk monitoring tracks emerging topics that could damage reputation if they develop unchecked. The company also offers influencer mapping, publicity and thought-leadership research, and reputation valuation, which attempts to put a financial measure on reputation as an intangible asset. Alongside the research itself, it provides professional development through the Academy for Communication Excellence, training practitioners in measurement and evaluation. The common thread is measurement in service of decisions: whether to change a message, respond to an issue, invest in a campaign or address a weakness that stakeholders have identified.
Clients and sectors
Echo reports serving more than 700 clients worldwide, and earlier company descriptions put the figure at over 500 clients spanning all sectors and regions. Its published sector expertise covers finance and professional services, education, government and the public sector, healthcare, consumer businesses, telecommunications, media and technology, utilities and energy, and charities and other non-governmental organisations. Historical company material noted work for a substantial share of FTSE and Fortune 100 companies, for government departments including the Home Office and the former Department of Trade and Industry, and for organisations such as UNICEF and WWF. Case material published by the company has described analysing the media profile of the Ministry of Defence and the Armed Forces during operations including Operation Telic in Iraq, and evaluating for the Environment Agency how far its enforcement actions and public safety information were reaching public awareness. Such examples illustrate the range of the work, from battlefield communications to flooding advice, united by the same question of how an institution is seen and heard.
Britain's Most Admired Companies
Echo runs Britain's Most Admired Companies, which it describes as the United Kingdom's longest-running corporate reputation survey and which it conducts for the London Stock Exchange. The study asks senior executives and analysts to assess leading companies — including their peers and competitors — on the attributes that make up corporate reputation, producing rankings based on the judgements of the business community itself rather than on financial results alone. Peer assessment gives the survey a distinctive character: a company is rated by the people who compete with it, invest in it or follow it professionally. The study provides Echo with a long-running dataset on how British corporate reputations rise and fall, and it anchors the company's reputation work in a public, repeatable benchmark that clients can be measured against. Running a recognised national study of this kind also serves the measurer: it demonstrates methodology in the open and keeps the firm's name attached to the wider debate about what corporate reputation is worth.
Part of Ebiquity
In 2011 Echo became part of Ebiquity, the media and marketing insights group, and was integrated into Ebiquity's market intelligence division. At the time of the sale Echo had offices in the United Kingdom, France, Singapore and the United States, reflecting the international character of reputation work for multinational clients. Sandra Macleod, the leader most closely associated with Echo, left the group about two years after the sale and went on to establish Mindful Reputation and the Academy for Communication Excellence, while Echo's research business continued inside Ebiquity. The period illustrates a familiar pattern in the research industry, in which specialist firms are absorbed into larger data and insights groups seeking to offer clients an integrated service across media, advertising and reputation. For a discipline built on independence of judgement, ownership by a larger group also raises the premium on method and transparency, since clients must be confident that the measurement has not been shaped by the measurer's other commercial interests.
Return to independence
In the early 2020s Ebiquity sold its reputation research business back to Sandra Macleod, through her agency Mindful Reputation, for an undisclosed sum, and the business resumed its former name of Echo Research. Announcing the move, Macleod said she was pleased to be reunited with the team and argued that clients increasingly wanted clear, pragmatic insight on communications and reputation from multidisciplinary teams under one roof — combining digital analytics, proven methodologies, global expertise, tailored solutions and qualified advisers across industries. The buy-back restored Echo as an independent specialist at a time when reputation had moved up the corporate agenda, driven by social media scrutiny, contested public debates about business conduct and growing board-level attention to intangible assets. An independent Echo could again present itself as a single-purpose measurer, selling objectivity as its core product.
Acquisition of Reputation Dividend
In 2024 Echo acquired Reputation Dividend, a business that helps global companies value their intangible reputational assets. The acquisition, reported in May of that year, added a financial-valuation specialism to Echo's existing audit and measurement work: where an audit describes how stakeholders perceive a company, valuation attempts to estimate what that perception contributes to the company's worth and how changes in reputation affect value over time. For clients, the combination offers a route from qualitative insight to a number that can be discussed in the language of finance directors and boards. The deal also signalled that the newly independent Echo intended to grow by acquisition as well as organically, assembling a broader reputation practice around its core research team.
People and recent appointments
Echo is led by chief executive Sandra Macleod, whose association with the business spans its Ebiquity period, the intervening years running Mindful Reputation and the Academy for Communication Excellence, and the buy-back that reunited her with the firm. In 2025 the company strengthened its leadership with several appointments reported in the research trade press. Matt Painter, a former Echo research director who had spent eleven years at Ipsos Corporate Reputation after an earlier spell at Ebiquity, rejoined as managing director for risk and reputation and joined the board; Giulio Vernaccini arrived from Ipsos as a research director, bringing experience of stakeholder perception and reputation dynamics projects. In October 2025 Nick Thomas, who had been deputy group chief financial officer at Dentsu International and held senior finance roles at Warner Music, CBS Outdoor and PolyGram, was appointed as a fractional chief financial officer to support financial planning and operational readiness as the company grew. Such appointments, in research, finance and commercial roles, are consistent with a small firm professionalising after a change of ownership and an acquisition.
Professional standing and awards
Echo states that it has won more than ninety industry awards for research excellence during a track record of more than twenty-eight years, and company material has noted that its clients have won a record number of awards from AMEC, the international association for the measurement and evaluation of communication, for work in which its research played a part. Its reports have been used by bodies including the former Press Complaints Commission, and its stakeholder and focus-group research has been presented to government ministers in connection with regulatory change. Membership of the measurement profession's institutions and presence on the United Kingdom Register of Expert Witnesses place the company within the formal infrastructure of British communications research — a field in which credibility, method and independence are the product being sold.
Place in the media measurement industry
Echo Research occupies the analytical end of the media intelligence market. Where monitoring companies supply the raw material — the cuttings, clips and posts — evaluation firms such as Echo interpret that material, connect it to stakeholder opinion and advise on what it means for reputation and communications strategy. Its history mirrors the development of the discipline itself: from press coverage analysis in the 1990s, through consolidation into a global insights group in the 2010s, to an independent revival centred on reputation as a board-level, financially material asset. Headquartered in London with a New York presence and research conducted across languages and markets, it serves as an example of the specialist British research firms that grew up alongside the public relations industry and now sell measurement to clients for whom reputation is managed, audited and increasingly valued like any other asset.
