Circana Brand Guidelines: IRI’s 1979 Scanners, NPD’s Diaries & a 2023 Coined Name

Supermarket scanners and purchase diaries.

Circana is a Chicago market research and technology company built from two older firms. One, Information Resources, Inc., or IRI, was formed in Chicago in 1979 by the market researcher John Malec and Gerald Eskin, a University of Iowa marketing professor, English Wikipedia says. The pair bought scanners for supermarkets so that point-of-sale data, read from bar codes at grocery checkouts, could be sold to consumer packaged goods companies that wanted to know what shoppers actually bought. Circana’s own history page gives the same founders and year, and describes IRI’s purpose as connecting consumer behaviour to the products bought at the supermarket.

The second firm was older. Circana says NPD was founded in 1966 by Henry Brenner, who developed a system for recording consumers’ buying habits through purchase diaries; English Wikipedia gives its earlier names as National Purchase Diary Panel Inc. and NPD Research Inc., so the diary idea survives in the initials. By 2017 NPD offered market research for more than 20 industries, Publishers Weekly reported.

IRI became a public company in 1983, English Wikipedia says, and later passed through private hands. Symphony Technology Group and Tennenbaum Capital Partners acquired it in late 2003, and New Mountain Capital bought the business, then known as SymphonyIRI, in March 2011. In April 2013 SymphonyIRI Group changed its name back to Information Resources, Inc., or IRI, Supermarket News reported from the company’s summit in Las Vegas. In January 2019 Vestar Capital Partners led a new investment in IRI, English Wikipedia says.

Checkout data, consumer panels and Liquid Data.

The two firms measured shopping in different ways. IRI built its business on store scanner data for grocery and packaged goods. NPD combined checkout data from retailers and distributors with purchases reported by consumers themselves, and ran a consumer survey service called VIP Voice, English Wikipedia says. In July 1999 NPD and the German research group GfK jointly bought the research firm Intelect ASW, and in early 2001 NPD bought the core business of PC Data and merged it into NPD Intelect, the same entry says. NPD tracked North American video game sales from 1995, and in January 2017 it bought Nielsen’s US book-industry research services, including BookScan and the PubTrack range, which became the core of a new practice called NPD Book, Publishers Weekly reported.

Today Circana describes its work as helping clients measure demand and accelerate demand. Its website lists 26 industries, from food and beverage and beauty to toys, video games, books and the automotive aftermarket, and groups its products into ranges with names such as Complete Market, Complete Consumer and Complete Beauty. The software that carries the data is called Liquid Data, a name already used in the 2022 merger announcement, which called it a technology and data visualisation platform. Newer additions on the site include Liquid Data Go, which the company says is designed for small packaged-goods businesses, and Liquid AI.

In its March 2023 announcement the company said it tracked products in more than 2,000 categories across more than 500,000 stores in 20 countries, and advised almost 7,000 brands and retailers; those are the company’s own figures for that date. For a design reader, the visible surface is the output. The company publishes industry rankings, a podcast called Circana Unpacked, and short “Quick Insights.” On its company page in November 2026, one such Quick Insight set a single percentage in large type above a one-line caption about pumpkin-flavoured coffee.

How research firms present themselves.

Market research and data firms sell something that is hard to picture: answers drawn from surveys, panels and statistics. Their public identity is therefore carried less by products than by publications and screens. Euromonitor International, for example, presents an annual Top Global Consumer Trends report as a headline release, issued from London in November 2026 in English, Japanese, Korean, Chinese, Arabic and Portuguese, while its newsroom lists press coverage that quotes its analysts.

The platform has become the main showcase. Euromonitor describes Passport as a single hub for market, industry and consumer data, and in June 2026 the trade news service MrWeb reported a rebuilt version with a conversational, AI-based interface. In the same month Dynata launched Dynata+, which it describes as a self-service platform where users check feasibility, see pricing and launch survey projects themselves. Firms that run panels also publish panel books and quality pages, and some name a standard such as ISO 20252 on their sites.

Numbers carry much of the visual weight. Euromonitor’s 2027 trends release gives each trend a short coined name followed by a few headline survey percentages, and Dynata says its new platform shows feasibility, pricing and project progress in real time. In a category like this, a brand is read through headings, figures and the screens that hold them.

Ownership is often part of the story told on corporate pages. Dynata’s press room keeps its 2017 merger release, its 2019 rename and its 2024 restructuring announcements; Euromonitor’s site describes it as independent and privately owned, and the UK company register shows its holding structure. This guide sets out what can be checked about each firm — who founded it, who owns it, and what it says about its own reach — and marks clearly what rests on the company’s word.

A coined name for a merged company.

The merger came in two stages. In October 2021 NPD entered an agreement to be acquired by the private equity firm Hellman & Friedman, English Wikipedia says. On 1 August 2022 IRI and NPD announced that their merger was complete. Hellman & Friedman became the majority investor, while Vestar Capital Partners and New Mountain Capital, long-term investors in IRI, kept significant investments in the combined company, the announcement said. A unified name and brand were promised for a later date.

They arrived on 7 March 2023, when the combined company unveiled the name and identity Circana. The company said the name conveyed a “360-degree, full-circle” understanding of the consumer and the market, and that the brand was created in partnership with the brand consulting firm Landor & Fitch. Writing in August 2025, the CDP Institute’s news service summed up the sequence the same way: Circana was formed in 2022 from the merger of The NPD Group and IRI, and adopted the Circana name in 2023. English Wikipedia gives the headquarters as Chicago and describes the company as majority owned by private equity.

Expansion continued by acquisition. In 2024 Circana announced plans to buy NCSolutions, a joint venture of Nielsen and Catalina focused on advertising effectiveness, together with Nielsen’s marketing mix modelling business. The company said the NCSolutions deal was completed on 2 June 2025 and the Nielsen modelling deal on 21 August 2025, timing the CDP Institute also reported. Stuart Aitken has been president and chief executive since 1 January 2025, English Wikipedia says.

For a design guide, Circana shows how a merged company can choose a coined name that states a promise rather than keep either parent’s initials. Compare Nielsen, from which Circana bought a marketing mix modelling business in 2025, and Kantar, another consumer-panel group. For this guide we use ink blue, teal and warm grey with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Circana’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.