The Harris Poll Brand Guidelines: A 1963 Opinion Survey, Nielsen, Stagwell & One Name

A research firm in 1956, then a running survey of public opinion.

The Harris Poll is older than the company that now owns it, and older than most of the companies that have owned it. Its story starts with a research firm. Daily Research News Online, the trade newsletter published by mrweb, reported in January 2017 that the Harris business was established in 1956 by the opinion researcher Louis Harris, and English Wikipedia gives the firm’s name as Louis Harris & Associates. In 1963, mrweb reported, Harris set up the Harris Poll itself, a continuing survey to measure public opinion in the United States. English Wikipedia describes it as one of the longest-running surveys of American public opinion.

The poll then passed through a long chain of owners. According to mrweb, the business was sold to the investment firm Donaldson, Lufkin & Jenrette in 1969, then to the media company Gannett in 1975, and in 1996 to the Gordon S. Black Corporation. English Wikipedia says Harris left Louis Harris & Associates in January 1992, while Gannett still owned it, and formed a second company, LH Associates; the original firm and the poll stayed with Gannett until the 1996 sale.

The new owner renamed itself around the poll. English Wikipedia says the Gordon S. Black Corporation became Harris Black International in 1997 and then, in 1999, a public company called Harris Interactive, traded on Nasdaq. The name of the poll did not change through any of these sales, English Wikipedia notes, and the Harris surname moved from the founder’s firm to the corporate name of the business that bought it.

Nielsen, then Stagwell.

The 2010s brought two more owners. mrweb reported that Nielsen acquired Harris Interactive in 2013; English Wikipedia dates Nielsen’s ownership from 2014. In less than a year, mrweb added, Nielsen sold Harris Interactive’s European arm to ITWP, the parent company of the survey-panel business Toluna.

In January 2017 the Stagwell Group, the investment company founded in 2015 by Mark Penn, acquired a set of custom research assets from Nielsen, including the Harris brand and the Harris Poll, mrweb reported on 24 January 2017. Stagwell said it would relaunch the group as Harris Insights & Analytics while keeping the Harris Poll name unchanged. It was Stagwell’s fifth majority-owned acquisition, mrweb noted, placing Harris beside the entertainment research firm National Research Group and the digital agency Code and Theory, among others. English Wikipedia says Stagwell hired John Gerzema and Will Johnson as co-chief executives, and that they relaunched the firm as The Harris Poll. In June 2017, mrweb reported, Stagwell also bought two Nielsen trackers, the Mobile Insights survey of the telecoms industry and the Total Communications Survey of video, internet and streaming use, and relaunched them under a new name, HarrisX, inside the Harris group.

The parent company changed shape again a few years later. English Wikipedia says the Stagwell Group announced in December 2020 that it would merge with its affiliate MDC Partners, and that the merger was completed in August 2021, creating Stagwell Inc., listed on Nasdaq and headquartered in New York. English Wikipedia lists the Harris Poll among Stagwell’s firms and gives the poll’s own headquarters as Chicago and New York City, with further offices in Washington, D.C., and Rochester, New York. Its sister firm Maru, which Stagwell bought in 2022, brought a survey platform called HUB that lets in-house marketers analyse behavioural, transactional and attitudinal data in one place, mrweb reported in 2023.

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.

One name stretched across a group.

Under Stagwell, the Harris name has been stretched across more of the group’s research. In August 2023 mrweb reported, in a corrected story, that Stagwell had not merged its research platform Maru into the Harris Poll; instead the two sister firms were working together on research tools sold under The Harris Poll brand. By then, mrweb said, the Harris Poll offered public opinion research, analytics and market-research consultancy, and had launched a Risk and Reputation unit with other Stagwell companies.

Two years later the UK arm took the name outright. On 17 June 2025 mrweb reported that Stagwell had rebranded Maru’s UK research consultancy as The Harris Poll UK, keeping its legal entity, leadership, operations and services unchanged; Stagwell had owned Maru since 2022. John Gerzema, quoted as chief executive of The Harris Poll, said the change reflected a plan to build one organisation across markets under one name.

The software side carries the name too. In December 2025 mrweb reported the appointment of a chief executive for Harris Quest, which it described as the suite of market-research and brand-management tools within The Harris Poll and Stagwell’s Marketing Cloud, offering self-service brand-tracking and survey tools. A month earlier, mrweb had reported that Will Johnson, formerly chief executive of the Harris Poll, had moved to lead another research company. In both reports John Gerzema was named as chief executive of The Harris Poll.

For a design guide, The Harris Poll shows how a founder’s surname can stay fixed while owners, parent companies and product lines change around it, from Harris Interactive to HarrisX and Harris Quest. Compare Nielsen, its owner in the 2010s, and Toluna. For this guide we use an ink blue, a chart red, a newsprint cream and graphite with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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