THE NEED FOR AN AUTHORITATIVE CONTEMPORARY MARKETING RESEARCH REFERENCE BOOK*

There is no question that the way companies market themselves and their products is changing. The classic model of marketing is broken and no new broadly accepted alternative has arisen to fix it. In a sense marketers are driving blind and historical wisdom is no longer fully applicable. We can feel famous economist, Joseph Schumpeter’s, “creative winds of destruction” blowing right in our faces.

Want evidence? Just look at how digital convergence (the unification of cable, broadcast TV and radio, computers, the Internet and “smart” telephony) changes everything it touches. In media alone DVRs alter TV viewing patterns, the explosion of cable channels deeply segments TV viewership, XM/Sirius is stirring up the radio market, new, ubiquitous and ever changing information sources driven by the Internet, GPS, smart phones (with their untold thousands of apps), tablet PCs and digital readers have created new forms of media behavior. Reading habits have so changed that newspapers and magazines are dying and the future of book publishing is very much up in the air. Vastly populated social networks are now key drivers in creating new trends and quickly changing communications platforms allow us to be instantly in touch with everyone, no matter where we and they are. Moreover, not well-known is that in 2009 the amount of airtime time accounted for by text- messaging on mobile networks exceeded the amount of time spent talking. 

Alvin Toffler wrote Future Shock in 1970 and diagnosed an uncomfortable personal disorientation caused by “too much change in too short a period of time.” That was 40 years ago; he wasn’t even close!  

The Challenge for Marketing Research 

We’re fond of saying: “Like it or not, the world keeps spinning.” We’ve already pointed out the radical changes impacting marketing in general and media in particular. Not surprisingly, the marketing research discipline has also been impacted by dramatic shifts in business thinking and practice. Consider these thoughtful opinions about how marketing research needs to change: 

“Without transforming our capabilities into approaches that are more in touch with the lifestyles of the consumer we seek to understand, the consumer-research industry as we know it today will be on life support by 2012.” (Kim Dedeker, V-P External Capabilities Leadership, Global Consumer and Market Knowledge for P & G, Advertising Age, 9/15/2008) “I don’t know if we are going to have a choice but to move away from survey research. We continue to torture consumers with boring and antiquated research methods. (Donna Goldfarb, VP-Consumer and Market Insight for Unilever, Advertising Age, 9/15/2008) 

"Conventional research which tries to understand the consumer through direct questioning---such as why they buy specific brand—has limited effect. We are trying to generate insights by trying to be the consumer (italics added) in order to generate a more emotional and power understanding. Our approach: 1. assumes much information is hidden, 2. uses different information sources, 3. entails much higher personal involvement (with the consumer) to win empathy, 4. involves the real world environment, 5. tries to become the consumer.” (Diego Kerner, Managing Partner, The Brand Gym, Brand Strategy, 3/2008)
 

Further, Doug User, Ph.D., a senior VP with Widmeyer Research & Polling, speaks about how consumer fragmentation makes it harder to find and understand target audiences. "Traditional methodologies were designed for a different culture than today. Traditional methods have become less reliable and raise issues of data quality. We need new metrics and methods: video blogs, online portals, emotional measurement, data harvesting, analysis of comments in online forums, and private online communities.

"Mary Ann Packo, the CEO of Millward Brown, one of the largest marketing research firms in the world sums of the challenges affecting the future of market research this way: “For marketers, the challenge is building brands in a fast changing world; for consumers, the challenge is deciding between so many options and choices; for researchers, the challenge is – given all this – how to connect marketers and consumers.”

C. Frederick John, a senior executive with MasterCard, feels that time and financial pressure is reducing the quality of the data researchers collect. He is particularly concerned that consumers who belong to Internet research panels may become professional respondents and, while demographically representative, are not attitudinally representative of the target population. Ty Albert, a Managing Director of Guideline Research, agreed that in the future “triangulation” will be required in the way we collect data. They feel that short bits of data gathered from several sources, employing scientific sampling models will come together to provide insights. And they argue that the industry needs more creative ways of engaging respondents in providing data and fewer 35 minute telephone surveys on attitudes and usage.

So how will the practitioners, users and teachers of marketing research understand and address these kinds of challenges? It won’t be via current marketing research texts and courses, which typically have very little to say about the actual practice of the discipline or, if they do, lag the real world by many years. Nor will it be via authoritative handbooks, which must be quite broad and largely tradition-oriented by their very nature. And it certainly will not be via refereed journals, whose articles are too theoretical, technical, and abbreviated and which rarely focus on a single practical topic.  

Rather, they are about: 

•  New ways of gathering and using data such as from social networks, via mobile telephones, on web 2.0 sites and through on-line focus groups.

•  Emerging forms of data such as physiometric measures, observational approaches that include photography and videography and monitored digital conversations that produce almost instantaneous research data.
• Understanding and using consumer emotions to build companies and brands.

•   The use of data mines, which combine behavioral data, demographics and attitudinal research and thus allow companies to target customers with pin-point accuracy.

•   Maintaining high quality data that is representative of their target audiences.

• And, just as important, a new philosophy about the role(s) that marketing research and marketing researchers must achieve for the discipline to reach its full potential.