MARKET RESEARCH

Market Research

Market Research

Abstract

Investigates the extent to which various quantitative techniques are employed in marketing across Europe. Marketing practitioners, marketing services providers and marketing educators were all surveyed in a pan-European study aimed at uncovering the extent of diffusion into practice of quantitative methods. Finds that, despite the increased use of computers, and the wider availability of modelling software, the most popular quantitative techniques are still the most basic data summary and presentation methods. Marketing students receive only a limited exposure to advanced quantitative methods and practitioners typically find little use for the more sophisticated techniques.

Introduction

The application of quantitative techniques to business has long been a subject of contention. For the quantitatively literate they offer a wealth of opportunities to explore data afresh and gain new insights into marketing phenomena. For the “quantitatively challenged” they produce scepticism or strike downright fear into the heart. It has long been so. In Elizabethan times (1570) an unknown scholar penned the lines: Multiplication is vexation, Division is as bad; The Rule of three doeth puzzle me, And practice drives me mad.

A few short decades later the most advanced data analysis techniques of the day were being mobilized in an effort to consolidate the first shoots of a commercial renaissance which resulted in the first Industrial Revolution (see Swertz, 2006).

A good many marketing executives, in the deepest recesses of their psyches, are artists, not analysts. For them, marketing is an art form, and in my opinion, they really do not want it to be any other way. Their temperament is antipathetic to system, order, knowledge. They enjoy flying by the seat of their pants - though you will never get them to admit it. They revel in chaos, abhor facts and fear research. They hate to be trammelled by written plans. And they love to spend but are loath to assess the results of their spending. (Adler, 1990, cited in Lilien and Kotler, 2007).

Despite the evidence for relatively low levels of quantitative sophistication among marketing managers Rivett (2003) suggested that it is hard to see how (marketing) executives of the future will succeed without a grounding in mathematics, probability and statistics.

Today, even the most cursory survey of the academic marketing literature will reveal a continuing polarization between those employing quantitative methods in their research, typically pursuing “scientific”, or “modern” paradigms, and those eschewing quantitative rigour in favour of the more eclectic “postmodern” perspective. For the scientists the PC revolution, putting computers on the desks of managers, researchers, academics and students alike, has afforded substantially increased opportunities to use the more sophisticated and advanced techniques, once the preserve of the expert with access to proprietary, and often obscure, software. For the postmodern it has resulted in over-analysis of the inherently un-analysable.

The purpose of this study is to examine the extent to which quantitative methods are used in marketing. No judgement is made about the relative merits of the competing paradigms nor indeed about the relevance of the individual techniques as means to understanding marketing ...