Viewpoint: The trouble with marketing research is marketing researchers

Nigel F. Piercy
Warwick Business School

While some of my best friends are marketing researchers (actually, I am lying, but it is a friendly start), I have some troubling thoughts about the current performance of marketing research and the changes which are essential to meet the challenges we face. Let me start by asking some antagonistic questions, which emerge from working with marketing decision makers rather than marketing researchers.

Is being myopic, narrow, unimaginative and uninformative, albeit with awesome scientific precision backed by unprecedented technological resources, really a sensible professional goal for marketing researchers? I ask, because it seems to be what you are trying to achieve a lot of the time.

Is providing incontrovertible and statistically-driven evidence that the blindingly obvious might be true in some situations (bearing in mind sampling and data limitations), or at least that it used to be (because we did the study three years ago), really the pinnacle of achievement to which you aspire?

I do not mean to be rude (I am lying, again), but does anyone really believe that marketing researchers can provide value to those who pay the bills, and justify their existence, with narrow perspectives, backward-looking self-congratulatory evidence about the past, a mania for methodology, and a complete subservience to technology? (I exclude from this question many who design training and education in marketing research, whose answers will clearly be in the affirmative.)

The paradox of all paradoxes is that there is compelling evidence across diverse business sectors that knowledge-based strategy characterizes the winners – quite simply, those who know more make more, while marketing researchers continue to enshrine their own irrelevance with an obsession with technique and methodology.

So, we may well ask, what then are the challenges facing marketing research professionals to earn their keep and enhance their contribution?

To start, the focus has to be on learning not technology; on decisions not data; on management understanding and insight not methodology. We exist to inspire and support innovation in management thinking and action, not simply to report facts. Our goals should be built around the need to identify and exploit new business opportunities, and to change the way in which decision makers understand the world and how they can respond effectively to the disruptive change, which characterizes that world.

For example, even something as basic as how we define markets and segments is up for grabs. As analysts, we like static, fixed market definitions based on geography, technology, product type and so on – because then we can do studies and analysis within the competitive box we have defined, and the numbers all add-up. We do not even see the killer blow until it is too late, because it comes from disruptive, market-changing innovation from outside the box that we call the 'market'. Conventional analysis too often blinds management to what really matters to survival and success. We can and should do better than this.

However, we cannot achieve such goals by producing reports and presentations of descriptive, historical data, which say nothing new and offer no new insights. Our role should be the active management of learning processes in organisations, the development of superior market sensing capabilities, and supporting responsiveness to new opportunities as they are located. Our role is to enhance, develop, share, and drive knowledge and market understanding within and across organisations. How else can we achieve value?

While this may need some revision to our thinking about traditional data capture and analysis, the challenge is one of leadership and creativity, and it is one of the most exciting challenges facing any profession at present. Those who rise to this challenge will help transform the marketing research profession from number-crunching to leadership in management learning.

International Journal of Market Research 48(3), 2006

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