Coincidentally, a good friend from my student days was in charge of market research at SBB at the time. Of course, they also talked about the customer panel over a glass of wine in the evening. She said that something like that would probably make a lot of sense for SBB – and so the idea of a joint panel was born.

And then we were faced with a ridiculous-sounding but real problem – what should the baby be called? Even before SBB was on board, we didn’t really want to brand the panel as a Swisscom panel, but rather make it something more “neutral”. So we brainstormed coffee break after coffee break in our café at Swisscom, unfortunately (or thank God) I have forgotten the many discarded ideas. “Allegra” was a favourite for a short time – but then we thought it sounded too much like a women’s magazine. At some point, the rather conservative but appropriate name “intervista” came up. It works well in all languages (that was our goal), the URL www.intervista.ch was still free, so: Go for it!

At that time, I was contacted by an acquaintance from Germany who had moved to Switzerland to work for a large company, where she was a one-woman show on the subject of Mafo. She longed for exchange with other market researchers. So we gathered our contacts in the corporate Mafo scene to initiate an exchange among corporate market researchers. It worked, and at the first meeting, which took place at Swisscom, a number of colleagues came, mainly from the large companies in Bern. It became a regular meeting, soon nationwide, always at one of the participating companies.

Of course, the meetings were also about our constantly growing customer panel. Some of the company market researchers signalled interest in using it for their studies. And there we had the dilemma – on the one hand, the demand was nice, but on the other hand, even when interpreted generously, it was certainly not part of Swisscom’s or SBB’s core business to sell market research services.

In April 2010, the time had finally come – I gave notice at Swisscom, found a small office room and could start. Christoph remained largely employed at SBB, so I was a little uneasy. After years in a large company with dozens of people around me, meetings, hallway conversations, open-plan offices, suddenly: silence. Alone in a room in a shared office with an NGO. Hardly any phone calls, few emails: silence.

Then came Moritz, our first employee, and with him some life into the joint. We already had orders at that time, one of the first was a very elaborate online diary study for a colleague from our now quite large network of in-house market researchers. Many hours in the office and garden went by while we worked on the report, apparently not unnoticed by the client: at the presentation, he greeted me with a grin ranging from worry to “Black or red?” What was meant, of course, was the project balance sheet. It was deep red, by the way.

We continued to grow and were now about 10 people. As probably every SME founder knows, this marks a magical boundary beyond which a company changes and has to change. Things that had previously run “just so” without structures and processes were now formalised – e.g. bookkeeping, time recording, budget control, holiday calendars. Fortunately, Christoph has a soft spot for these things.

And this is where I first come to talk about our relationship as joint company founders: We have always complemented and understood each other wonderfully, even though (or perhaps because) we tick so differently. Christoph is very good at business figures, administrative things, structures, processes and has also developed more and more into an IT expert. I’m not particularly good at all that, but have always been primarily interested in market research questions, methods and data analyses. Without Christoph, I would have probably run the company into the ground a hundred times over from an economic point of view.

And here we are – 2020, 10 years of intervista, around 30 employees, more than 100,000 panellists.

But what will happen next? In terms of content, we will certainly focus on our core business of quantitative and qualitative market research, but also pursue other important business areas such as AI and its application in the area of data collection and analysis. Of course, we also want our panel to remain one of the biggest and best in the country.

And apart from that? We have a really great team; it’s rare to find so many people “in one bunch” who come to work in the morning happy and motivated. We want to keep that at all costs: Customer orientation, professional competence and this team spirit.

Finally, we would like to thank all our customers. Without their trust, intervista would not exist.

Thank you very much!

Julia Urbahn, 25.11.2020