172 The Marketing Book
producing companies, and, to a certain extent,
the middlemen, to fulfil one condition of
marketing philosophy, which is that it is an
exchange process between parties to their
mutual satisfaction. Such a principle demands
that producers should place the consumer at
the focus of their business strategy.
However, if marketing is accepted as an
exchange process – and as Bagozzi (1975)
writes, ‘in order to satisfy human needs, people
and organizations are compelled to engage in
social and economic exchange with other peo-
ple and other organizations... they do this by
communicating and controlling the media of
exchange, which, in turn, comprises the links
between one individual and another’ – then
companies must learn how, not only to commu-
nicate with their actual and potential custom-
ers, but also to listen to what they are saying.
‘Saying’ implies the use of language, and the
‘language’ to be used must be that of the
consumer. Organizations must then, in the
majority of cases (high technology being some-
what of a case apart), learn consumer-speak, to
paraphrase Orwell.
Marketing research is a bundle of tech-
niques which have been developed or annexed
from other disciplines that, via the implementa-
tion of their new-found linguistic skills, enable
companies to generate a stream of valid, timely
and apposite information from and about cus-
tomers concerning their thoughts and ideas
about current goods/services and those to
which they aspire. As Malo and Marone (2002)
note: ‘As corporate leaders redefine their prior-
ities and company objectives, in these uncertain
times the role that market research can play
becomes more important... there exists a
significant opportunity for marketing research
to guide and support strategy development.’
The chapter will be structured as follows:
after defining marketing research and detailing
the types of research that are available, the
process of marketing research will be analysed.
The use of secondary data follows, and then the
various types of primary quantitative research
are described, together with questionnaires and
their design. The various forms of qualitative
research are discussed, to be succeeded by a
description of the way measurement, in theory
and practice, is employed in the research
process. The chapter will end with an exposi-
tion of the way attitudes are conceptualized
and scaled, and how research results should be
analysed and presented.Definitions of the role of marketing research
Marketing research occupies a service function
within organizations; its main function is to
supply managements with reliable, valid,
timely, relevant and current information.
A manager’s ability to rely upon their past
experience as a guide to the future has been
constrained by the factors touched upon in the
introduction to this chapter; the amounts of
‘danger’ in the business environment have
increased, and change becomes the only con-
stant. Managers have to take decisions with far-
reaching consequences, opportunities must be
grasped, threats avoided, markets segmented,
target markets selected, control exercised, mar-
keting plans implemented and monitored. But
managers do not make decisions in a vacuum –
there is an environment, outside their control,
of which they must take due note. Marketing
research can be viewed as the managerial
senses through which managers can view the
outside world and then use the imputs from
their corporate eyes, ears etc. to moderate those
processes over which they do have control, and
thus yoke their internal actions with environ-
mental changes.
Managements should learn to act proac-
tively and not reactively; thus, the ability to
identify, measure, evaluate and anticipate rele-
vant change is a managerial function which is
becoming increasingly critical to the long-term
success of organizations. Data should be gath-
ered in such a manner that the end result
renders a valid, lifelike representation of the