Understanding in Market Research

Market research has enormous potential for creating market understanding, which pays off in huge marketing productivity gains and quantum leaps in corporate entrepreneurship. It is failing to deliver because the effort is concentrated at the bottom of the corporate decision hierarchy and because users of research do not use it to its full potential. Defines what “understanding” means in market research and describes how it comes from purposeful questioning, the generation of “nuggets” of information using different sources and different techniques, the results of which require intensive analysis and assembly into causal pictures of what is happening and why. Sees problems arising because researchers are purchasers not analysts of market research, and lays ultimate responsibility for this with managing and marketing directors because they are not asking the fundamental questions about their businesses.