From a spare bedroom in Stockport to fieldwork across 38 countries. Ten years of BEAM, five years of international adventures, and quite a few stamps in our metaphorical passport.
In 2021, our clients started asking us a question. Could we take the same recruitment expertise, attention to detail and personal service they’d come to expect from BEAM in the UK and deliver it further afield?
The short answer was yes. The slightly longer answer involved trusted partners, local knowledge, some ambitious project briefs and becoming considerably more familiar with time zones.
Five years later, international fieldwork is firmly embedded in what we do. Since launching BEAM International in 2021, we’ve received more than 230 international project commissions, placed thousands of UK and global participants into research and delivered fieldwork across 38 countries. Not bad for a business that started life in a spare bedroom in 2016.
As BEAM celebrates its tenth birthday, we’re looking back at how our horizons expanded, the clients who helped us get there and the people who make it all happen.
IT STARTED WITH A QUESTION
By 2021, the research industry was changing fast. Brexit had brought new challenges for businesses working across borders, while the pandemic had accelerated the move towards digital research.
Online methodologies were opening up new opportunities to connect with audiences around the world, and research agencies were adapting to an increasingly international marketplace.
Our clients were thinking bigger too. Agencies we already worked with in the UK were expanding their international reach and asking whether BEAM could support them in new markets. We knew how to find the right people, manage complex recruitment and look after the details, but the challenge was taking that expertise further afield without losing the quality and personal service our clients had come to expect.
For BEAM Founder and Director Amy Middleton, the opportunity was difficult to ignore.
And so, in summer 2021, BEAM International was born.
Verve commissioned our first official international project, a consumer skincare study. Instinct Lab followed with research involving gamers across the globe, and then Impact came looking for US-based vapers. Three very different briefs, but one important common thread: clients trusted us to take what we did well in the UK and make it work further afield.
By the end of that first year, we’d delivered 23 international projects for 16 clients. Some were existing relationships taking us into new territories, while others were entirely new clients commissioning exclusively international work. It was an encouraging start and a clear sign that there was an appetite for the kind of international fieldwork support we could offer.
WE’D ALREADY PACKED OUR BAGS
Although 2021 marked the official launch of BEAM International, our adventures beyond the UK actually started a little earlier. Back in 2018, we were already coordinating confidential automotive research that involved recruiting 62 UK participants and flying them to Düsseldorf, Germany.
It was no ordinary recruitment brief.
Alongside finding the right people and managing complex quotas, there were flights, transfers, accommodation, schedules and participant communications to organise. And, of course, the small matter of making sure everyone arrived in the right place at the right time.
As our Automotive Flyouts case study demonstrates, a beautifully balanced quota is little comfort if everyone is standing at the wrong airport. Looking back, it seems our appetite for complicated automotive briefs and international logistics was well established before we officially put it on the menu.
FROM ONE PROJECT TO 38 COUNTRIES
What began with 23 international projects for 16 clients in 2021 quickly gathered momentum. Over the following five years, our international work grew to more than 225 project commissions, covering everything from everyday consumer research to highly specialist audiences and complex, multi-market studies.
Our geographic reach has grown alongside the work. By 2023, we’d delivered fieldwork across 22 countries, increasing to 35 in 2024 and reaching 38 at the start of this year, a figure we’re maintaining in 2026. Much of our international work has centred on North America and Western Europe, although we’ve seen increasing demand across Asia-Pacific since early 2025.
Of course, reaching more countries is one thing. Coordinating research across multiple markets within a single project brings a whole new level of complexity.
A recent international brief saw us coordinating research across ten markets: Australia, China, Hong Kong, South Korea, Taiwan, India, the UAE, the UK, France and Mexico. That’s ten different markets, each with its own time zones, local requirements and recruitment challenges, all brought together under one coordinated project.
It’s the kind of work that demonstrates how global fieldwork goes far beyond simply finding participants. It requires careful planning, consistent communication, trusted local expertise and the ability to keep everything moving in the same direction, even when the teams involved are thousands of miles apart.
More countries, more complex briefs and considerably more time-zone calculations.
NOT YOUR AVERAGE FIELDWORK BRIEF
One of the best things about international fieldwork is the variety. Since 2021, our projects have taken us from specialist professions and luxury fashion to gaming, automotive, drinks, pets and hobbies.
While the audiences might be wildly different, the challenge is always the same: find the right people, understand what makes them relevant and make sure the research runs smoothly. Some projects have been particularly memorable, not just for the audiences involved, but for the specialist skills and creative problem-solving they’ve demanded.
Making a clean sweep
In 2023, Germany-based Spinnaker Insights commissioned BEAM to explore UK consumers’ perceptions of Vileda’s spin mop. The research combined in-home product testing, an online community and in-person discussions, giving participants the opportunity to put the product through its paces.
The findings helped inform thinking around media planning and advertising investment, demonstrating how carefully recruited consumer research can support important commercial decisions. In this case, international collaboration was applied to the very practical business of understanding British cleaning habits.
Getting under the surface
Also in 2023, we began working with Foolproof and Germany’s Rheingold Institute, two relationships that brought different specialist recruitment challenges and helped develop our experience of delivering research for highly specific audiences.
For Foolproof, our work has involved finding carefully defined consumer and business audiences for complex user research, where identifying the right participants requires more than a standard screening questionnaire. Understanding professional responsibilities, relevant experience and the context in which people use products or services is often just as important as meeting the basic recruitment criteria.
Rheingold takes a distinctly psychological approach to understanding consumers, exploring the emotions, motivations and tensions that influence people’s relationships with products and brands.
Our role has been to recruit relevant UK consumers and industry specialists who can bring those conversations to life, providing the right participants for research that looks beyond what people say they do to explore the motivations behind their behaviour.
Different methodologies and very different audiences, but both partnerships reinforce the importance of thoughtful recruitment and genuine participant understanding.
Taking research on the road
In 2024, we were back in familiar automotive territory, this time taking company car drivers and fleet managers from Heathrow to Hamburg for confidential vehicle research.
As with our earlier German automotive projects, successful delivery depended on much more than recruitment. Flights, transfers, schedules, confidentiality and participant care all had to come together, with every element carefully coordinated to ensure participants could focus on the research rather than the logistics of getting there.
And when the research involves a top-secret vehicle, there’s not much room for improvisation.
From gaming to global luxury
Since 2024, we’ve supported Interpret with recruitment and fieldwork for UK pre-launch gaming research, helping bring relevant players into studies designed to understand how new games might be received. Finding participants with the right gaming experience and knowledge is an important part of ensuring that feedback is meaningful and relevant.
At the other end of the spectrum, our Designing Luxury: Cross-Market Fashion Insights project involved recruiting and verifying luxury consumers across London and New York. Both projects demanded a detailed understanding of their audiences, even if the participants’ interests, purchasing habits and expectations were rather different.
And in 2025, our recruitment and fieldwork supported Dialect’s award-winning campaign, Finding the Frequency of Feeling: The Sound Science of Branding. The campaign took Gold at the International Content Marketing Awards 2025, recognising how audience data and insight could be translated into a powerful content strategy.
For BEAM, it was another reminder of the value of getting the right people into the research. Our contribution helped provide the audience insight behind a campaign that went on to achieve international recognition.
Whether the outcome is a product launch, a brand decision or a deeper understanding of consumer behaviour, our contribution starts with making sure the right people are in the conversation. Because even the cleverest research is only as good as the people taking part.
THE PEOPLE BEHIND THE PROJECTS
Of course, international fieldwork doesn’t happen by itself. Behind every project is a team bringing together recruitment expertise, project coordination and relationships with trusted delivery partners around the world.
Today, Genevieve de Sutter and Elyse Kilmore lead BEAM’s specialist global fieldwork offering, helping clients navigate different markets, audiences, methodologies and local requirements while maintaining the standards they expect from BEAM.
Whether they’re coordinating recruitment across several countries, working through the practicalities of an unfamiliar market or managing the finer details of a particularly challenging brief, their role is to bring everything together into one joined-up service.
For clients, that means having a dedicated BEAM team looking after the detail, even when the research itself spans several continents. Different countries, different challenges, same BEAM attention to detail.
THE PARTNERS BEHIND THE REACH
Going global doesn’t mean knowing everything about everywhere. It means knowing the right people who do.
Since going global, we’ve built relationships with trusted local delivery partners who bring the market knowledge, cultural understanding and practical expertise needed to make international research work. These relationships are central to our ability to deliver consistent, high-quality fieldwork while adapting to the very different requirements of individual markets.
One of those relationships began in December 2021, when we teamed up with Nordic Viewpoint on a whisky research project. Based in the Nordic region, they’ve since become a trusted partner for research across Sweden, Norway, Denmark and Finland, supporting everything from participant recruitment and online communities to translation and moderation.
And it’s not simply about finding people who tick the right boxes. It’s about understanding how research works in each market, keeping participants engaged and spotting potential problems before they become actual problems.
The best partners don’t just deliver a brief. They ask questions, share their knowledge and come armed with solutions. Five years on, Nordic Viewpoint remain part of the international relationships that help BEAM deliver fieldwork beyond the UK.
In 2026 so far, we’ve worked with 17 international delivery partners, bringing together local expertise across a wide range of markets. These include Indonesia, China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, South Korea and the UAE, alongside Germany, France, Sweden, Norway, Denmark and Finland, plus the US and Canada. It’s a network built through working together, returning to familiar markets and knowing who we can rely on when a brief gets complicated.
That local knowledge makes a practical difference. On one multi-market project, trusted partners helped us deliver in-person client and moderator briefings, working as an extension of BEAM to make sure every market was set up consistently. Each partner brought their understanding of the local market, while helping us keep the briefings aligned and the wider project moving in the same direction.
It’s the balance that makes international delivery work: people who understand the detail on the ground, with one coordinated approach bringing everything together. Different markets, familiar faces and rather fewer things left to chance.
Because while our reach might be global, great fieldwork still comes down to good people and strong relationships.
LOCAL KNOWLEDGE, GLOBAL STANDARDS
One thing we’ve learned over the past five years is that international fieldwork involves a lot more than translating a screener and checking the time difference.
Local holidays can affect availability, cultural expectations influence how people respond to research invitations, and incentives need to be appropriate for the market. Recruitment materials must also make sense to the people receiving them, taking into account differences in language, terminology and local circumstances.
What works perfectly well in one country might need a completely different approach in another, which is why trusted local expertise matters so much. It’s also why we put considerable emphasis on clear screening criteria, participant verification, communication, consistent reporting and contingency planning.
These are the practical details that help protect quality across international projects. They might not make the headlines, but they’re often what makes the fieldwork work.
Our approach is explored further in Protecting Quality Across Global Projects, which looks at the considerations behind successful multi-market delivery.
Ultimately, knowing where to find people is one thing. Knowing how to reach them, engage them and deliver a consistent research experience across different markets is another. Bringing those elements together is what allows us to offer international reach without compromising on local understanding.
HERE’S TO WHEREVER WE GO NEXT
Ten years ago, BEAM started with one person, one spare bedroom and a big idea. Five years later, we took that idea global, building on the relationships, expertise and reputation we’d already established in the UK.
Today, our work has reached 38 countries, connected us with brilliant people around the world and given us more than a few interesting stories along the way. We’ve learned new markets, tackled unfamiliar challenges, developed specialist expertise and built relationships that continue to grow alongside us.
And while our horizons have expanded considerably, the things that matter haven’t changed. Great people, trusted relationships, a willingness to tackle the tricky briefs and fieldwork delivered with care remain at the heart of what we do.
We’re proud of how far we’ve come, grateful to the clients and partners who’ve taken us there, and excited about where the next chapter might lead.
The world has become a bigger place for BEAM. And we’re only getting started.
Planning research across markets, or commissioning UK fieldwork from overseas?