Marketing Research: A Practical Approach For the New Millennium

Citation

Greig, I.D. (2002), "Marketing Research: A Practical Approach For the New Millennium", Qualitative Market Research, Vol. 5 No. 2. https://doi.org/10.1108/qmr.2002.21605bae.002

Marketing Research: A Practical Approach For the New Millennium

Marketing Research: A Practical Approach For the New Millennium

J.F. Hair, R.P. Bush and D.J. OrtinauMcGraw-Hill Publishing CompanyMaidenhead2000704 pp.ISBN: 0071164766£33.99Keywords: Marketing research, USA, Problem solving

This book is similar to many other academic texts on marketing research, mainly by US authors. It focuses on the gathering, recording and analysing of data and does a professional job in this, though the average marketing practitioner would have a difficult job telling it apart from its competitors. Its layout, the tables, figures and vignettes are pleasing to the eye and the text is appropriate and clear for the undergraduate, the target market.

It begins with Part I on the role of market research, problem definition and information management. Part II is about designing the research project; Part III about gathering and collecting data; and Part IV is on data preparation and analysis. As one of its points of difference it claims to spend more time than most texts on secondary data but, to my notice, it did not give a single website address, and all the sources it did give were US based.

Though it made no particular claims for international suitability, being content to provide some useful "global" vignettes, many of its competitors have gone further to provide a chapter on international research. Its unsuitability for international use is reinforced by some implied criticisms of non-US qualitative research. "Most foreign research agencies seem to adapt well to our format if properly informed and supervised" (p. 239). European qualitative research practitioners seem to regard their approach to be in advance of the US model.

In terms of its intentions, it probably achieves its first stated aim of "providing students with a body of knowledge that is easy to read and understand and that facilitates self learning". Some editions of the book come with an SPSS disk of exercises, a feature that is probably now necessary for such texts.

Their second aim is to provide students with the "skills to solve business problems" –’more on this shortly – and the third is to provide a learning resource for teachers, which the book does, but in a way that is hardly unique and which generally comes with the territory anyway.

What this text (and this class of texts) does not do is to prepare a marketing student for the things they need when they take a job in marketing (Catterall and Clarke, 2000), either in product or brand management or in marketing research; to repeat, not even for a job in marketing research.

Consider that about 90-95 per cent of the average corporate consumer research budget is spent on about seven different research purposes. These are category usage and attitude studies, brand image modelling and segmentation, product feature and price optimisation, qualitative, product and communications testing, ad and brand tracking and customer satisfaction.

Students require an understanding of these types of study that companies commission every day, and the issues of theory that underpin these studies such as positioning, segmentation, prediction and motivation. As Gibson (2000, pp. 38-9) notes:

We researchers predict human behaviour right now and … we do a pretty good job. We predict elections with remarkable precision; we can do a decent job of predicting which TV commercial will sell more; and we even predict new product volumes reasonably well. Unfortunately few professors or researchers seem to understand that research must predict the future, not simply describe the past [when] the descriptive survey has become the dominant technique of quantitative research.

And worse could be occurring. Textbooks such as the current one, though worthy in their intention, may be inoculating the marketing student against the industry's successful prediction techniques: "If I didn't do it at uni, it probably doesn't rate". It is as if the pioneering work of the top US academics on choice modelling and the top research agencies on prediction had never existed. Simulated test marketing gets one page and conjoint gets 2½ pages out of nearly 700.

Which is not to say that students should be denied the likes of sampling theory. It is just that there is so much else they are not getting that is more valuable to a marketing manager-to-be. On sampling, the statisticians in the big research agencies have seen hundreds of studies; i.e. they have walked the talk on sampling and reliability and have solved the issues decades ago. Hence, the new assistant marketing manager has little to add here, or in types of attitude scales to use, but they do need to know the issues around tracking a brand, for instance.

The unfortunate illusion is perpetrated in this text that attribute importance can simply be asked of consumers. This is done through several examples, though the key issue of importance is not explicitly addressed. The fact that importance is still routinely and uncritically asked of respondents in the industry at large is to the discredit of all its players.

In this text there is little about the organisational context of getting studies accepted. When the probable failure rate of marketing research in terms of positively affecting marketing actions is around 80 per cent, when the factors driving a successful product launch are weighted about 4 : 1 to organisational factors versus good research (Stefflre, 1986), and when a CASRO survey notes the imperative of getting management onside for the successful actioning of research results, this could be said to be an omission.

This class of texts generally also does not address the basic retail and consumer panel data on sales and prices that are the staple diet of any product manager. Students are offered no principles such as gap analysis that can turn such data into a rich managerial resource; rather they must remain incomprehensible for the new manager.

This review has not been a review of a text so much as of a class of texts, and has found them wanting in terms of "solving business problems". For a teacher wanting to do something more lifelike, they have to search across many books, for example Lilien and Rangaswamy (1999) and Urban and Hauser (1993) for techniques for product development, and Myers (1996) for segmentation. Another source in Europe is the edited compendiums sponsored by ESOMAR (McDonald and Vangelder, 1998) and the MRS (Birn, 2000) for some discussion on the research studies that company and agency researchers actually implement. But many of these are not suitable as texts because of price and the assumptions they make as to prior knowledge. It appears that the irrelevancy of market research teaching in universities (Catterall and Clarke, 2000) will continue for a while yet, as long as it is based around texts such as this.

Ian D. GreigLancaster University Management School