[1][2] ICM is a subsidiary of Creston Insight, a marketing services company, and is a member of the British Polling Council under its new name Walnut Unlimited.
All founders joined from Marplan, a market research company that ceased to exist just before ICM being set up.
FieldworkUK was set up as a face-to-face interviewing operation in 1999, followed by ICM Direct for telephone (and later, online data collection) in 2001.
The company has won various awards for its polling work, including both the Innovation in Research Methodology 2013 and the Market Research Society Silver Medal for Best Paper in the International Journal of Market Research (IJMR) 2013, won by Martin Boon" for his paper Predicting Elections - a Wisdom of Crowds Approach"; Nick Sparrow won the silver medal in 2007 for "Developing reliable online polls" and with John Turner in 1995/96 for "Messages from the spiral of silence: developing more accurate marketing information in a more uncertain political climate".
[4] In 2014, research papers cover topics such as business banking, mobile commerce and retirement planning.