1
The evolution of marketing research
Merlin Stone, Len Tiu Wright and Luiz Moutinho
Summary
This chapter develops hypotheses and scenarios about the evolution of marketing research. It considers the impact on marketing research of the appearance and development of new digital data sources and of the rise and rapid rise to market dominance of new companies that create and then exploit this data. It investigates the role of academic research versus that of grey literature and how the relative roles of these two ways of publishing research may change. It also considers how digital developments may affect decisions about whether to use primary or secondary research approaches. It investigates the rise of the discipline of customer or consumer insight and how this affects the world of marketing research. We then consider how these developments might change what clients need and how marketing researchers might respond to their new and ever-changing needs, using several scenarios whose characteristics and probabilities are discussed.
Introduction
What is the future of marketing research as an industry? What is the future of marketing researchers? These are big questions, which we answer in this book in many ways by giving examples of good academic marketing research but digging into the future of big data, platforms, smart cities or technologies designed to relate what goes on in your brain to what you think about products and services and what you buy.
However, our overall conclusion is clear. If you are a marketing researcher, or want to be one, and are worried about the future of the industry or about whether the skills that you are acquiring as a student will be useful, our advice to you is that you should only be worried if you see your core skills as devising ways to collect yet more data in ways that comply with archaic self-imposed regulations and practices relating to anonymity of respondents and avoidance of bias in sampling. For you, the future is pretty bleak, because you are not providing what the market wants, because you are surrounded by organisations which are making powerful use of data about named customers and by customers whose view is that so long as the data is being used to help meet their needs, and being handled responsibility, anonymity is not an issue for them.
On the other hand, if you see yourself as expert in making sense of what the new types of data say, of exploring it, of channelling it into decision-making or even encouraging new types of decisions, then your time has come – but it may not be in a conventional marketing research company. If you take the latter view, then your aim is to help organisations by improving the breadth, depth, quality and timeliness of insight and foresight. Your aim is not necessarily to worry too much about the quality of an individual finding or piece of research but rather to help organisations make sense of multiple sources, using them to triangulate the sources and view data from different angles. Your aim is also to inspire creativity and innovation in your clients, not just to help them achieve what they have told you they want to achieve. In other words, one of your aims is to identify new things that they can aspire to achieve.
Definitions – what do marketing researchers do?
The traditional concepts of marketing research have been completely overtaken by the consequences of changes in the social, economic, technological, business and marketing environments. A traditional academic way of proceeding by reading about concepts, developing further concepts and seeing how they apply in the field has been challenged and perhaps even overtaken by empirical evidence and shaken to the core by global events, such as the Covid-19 pandemic and impact of global warming on business and consumer demand. Pandemic lockdown measures coupled with government rules on social distancing based on fears of the spread of the coronavirus have affected businesses, communities and organisations, including universities world-wide, with GDP growth in countries taking a severe hit (The Economist 2020). For example, in the many countries whose economies depend on manufacturing products and on providing face-to-face consumer services, demand for these decreased during government lockdown restrictions as stores, restaurants, hotels and leisure facilities were closed. Redundancies increased; workers were furloughed; and the aviation, hospitality, tourism and leisure industries suffered as consumers were restricted to being allowed out for exercise and to shop only for necessities. Universities sent students home and went online to teach and examine during the pandemic.
Such changes affected data provision, with shortages of consumer and business information occurring where this information was provided face to face, while the boom in online shopping home delivery and home entertainment led to a surge in new customers for companies such as Amazon and Netflix and home delivery networks. As noted by The Economist (2020, p. 69), “sectors of the economy most affected by lockdowns…. often have the longest lags in reporting, making early estimates especially unreliable … in some cases, collecting data is impossible.” Suppliers of credit cards and contactless payments benefited and will continue doing so, as many companies refused cash payments for health reasons, so the shift to online shopping and entertainment and the resulting surge in credit card usage and contactless payments (Financial Times 2020a) gives meaning to the cashless society, thus also making digital data collection easier. In such conditions, senior executives in organisations in these sectors who are responsible for strategic decision-making should not assume a continuous stream of data and analytical conclusions. Marketing researchers have needed to adapt to environmental uncertainties in data provision, often reflecting radical changes in behaviour and switches between brands.
For this and other reasons identified throughout this book, the role of marketing research has certainly changed in the last few decades, mostly under pressure from new data. Individual research projects to quantify product usage and attitudes, identify optimum channels of distribution and work out which advertisements are more effective – these have been or are being swept away because the answer to these questions is increasingly provided automatically as part of the data that flows between customers and companies in marketing and sales operations or from social media where customers reveal and discuss their usage, perceptions and attitudes. In other words, the sources of data have changed. However, the old questions that marketing researchers have conventionally answered remain, though they are not posed in the same way.
For example, it is conventional to say that marketing researchers are now less involved in quantitative studies of what customers do, how often and how much, and more focused on understanding why. However, we must be careful about this assumption. Why do clients need to know why? In some cases, the reason they want to know why people like or do not like a product or service is so that they can plan the next one better. However, if social media gives them some guidance as to the question why, and new product ideas can be tested much more easily, quickly and at low cost, then improving, say, product design using marketing research information may not be such a good strategy when different designs can be tested quickly using digital interaction with clients and the best product identified.
This example demonstrates that we should pose the question about the future of market research differently, not in terms of what we do know, for example, qualitative vs quantitative, survey vs ethnography, but in terms of what insight and foresight users need. Yes, we may need to translate these into categories with which we are familiar, but we need to start with the future of clients’ needs, not the future of the techniques that we use and with which we are familiar.
So, the purpose of this chapter is to visualise the future needs of clients relating to insight and foresight and then translate them into how marketing researchers can meet them. In this, we try to avoid seeing marketing research as an industry but rather as a set of capabilities which may or may not be collected into a company that calls itself a marketing research company.
Data, data everywhere – data collection and making sense of information overload
Information overload, a term attributed to a US social scientist, Bertram Gross (1964), and popularised from the mid-1960s, is predicated upon human dependence on technology. An array of modern products combining the power of computers and the Internet, increasingly accessed by mobile devices that give information on the location of the customer, has long transformed the old-fashioned image of a marketing researcher with a clipboard asking questions of selected passers-by or conducting group discussions. Modern marketing research takes place in a world of what would once have been called technophiles, saturated by emails in inboxes and using LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, Snapchat or whatever new social medium comes down the track; blogging to transmit information to countless more people; or responding to or commenting on any of these. Digital intrusion is normal, whether through the impossibility of gaining the attention of respondents talking into or tapping smartphones or through unwanted messages appearing when a respondent is trying to concentrate on answering an online questionnaire. However, one strong point of marketing researchers is (or should be) coping with the reality of data collection, whether in designing research strategies, sampling, collecting the data and designing questionnaires and whether using qualitative, quantitative or mixed methodologies or deriving and validating results to support marketing decision-making,
Primary or secondary research?
In today’s fast-moving data situation, due to a range of pressures, such as the academic requirement for early posting of research or the increasing use of marketing research as published thought leadership, resulting in widespread publicity being given to research studies, much research that would once have been regarded as primary becomes secondary data very rapidly. So it is not surprising the authors have been asked by students new to marketing research about what the definition of secondary data is. The traditional definition of secondary data is previously published and accessible works, such as government and industry publications, bibliographic databases and syndicated services that have been collected for purposes other than for the research problem immediate to the researcher (Wright and Crimp 2000). In contrast, primary or field and in-laboratory research is devised by a researcher with the intention of solving a problem at hand. As we shall see throughout this book, this simple distinction may not work in many situations.
Search behaviour
In understanding users’ search behaviour, our students generally use Google and Google Scholar and their university’s own library search engine (which indexes not only the titles and summaries but also the full content of articles). A common practice among marketing and marketing research students and – increasingly – marketing consultants is to start their searches using Google and Google Scholar, and, where these searches yield results which are not publicly available (e.g. via Research Gate, Academia.eu or other posting sites through university open access archives), to search their own university or corporate library to see if the library’s subscription includes the required article.
Academic journals
Journal publishers perform a range of valuable functions, which have been enumerated in many publications and blogs, such as that of Anderson (2018). They include the soliciting, assessing, aggregating and integration of content, as well as its production, distribution, marketing and hosting. Authoring and review management are very labour intensive but increasingly automated. Workflow analytics have become very important for checking the performance of journals and authors. There has also been a rise in the sales of individual articles from journals and individual chapters from books, although sales of whole journal subscriptions still dominate (Johnson et al. 2018).
Data on the number of reputable management journals seems to be harder to find...
