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This chapter focuses primarily on advertising agencies and market research firms, the two principal outside suppliers of professional services to most marketing managers. The issues that govern the working relationship between the organization and these two agents are similar to those for other service providers. To implement many of the organization's marketing programmes requires working with outside suppliers of services, such as consultants, distributors, advertising agencies, and market research firms. Being outside the organization enables them to look at the marketing issues with more detachment than most insiders. Good working relationships with service suppliers provide leverage for the marketing team's internal capabilities. However, to gain the most benefit from these professional service firms requires the development of a commercial arrangement that is based on sound economic foundations.

This chapter surveys the practice of American market research from the 1940s to the 1960s, focusing especially on the postwar ascendancy of market researchers as independent “knowledge entrepreneurs” outside of corporate hierarchies and advertising agency structures. In part, these new experts were a result of the interplay of academic and commercial research covered in previous chapters. Being “scientific” outsiders to the corporate process provided both advantages and disadvantages within the business world, and research consultants at times struggled to find their proper role. Here, I will highlight two case studies of European émigrés, Ernest Dichter and Alfred Politz, who were not only two of the leading marketing research experts during the 1950s and but also counted among the most influential voices in the field. They stood on the forefront of a growing emphasis on scientific method and on creative innovation in midcentury consumer capitalism.

The professionalization of marketing research and efforts in “consumer engineering” drew on new insights in fields from social psychology to communication studies, which thrived at mid-century because of transatlantic knowledge-circulation. This chapter follows the exemplary transatlantic careers of members of the “Vienna school of market research.” The group emerged from the Wirtschaftspsychologische Forschungsstelle, a social research institute associated with the University of Vienna during the early 1930s. Next to Paul Lazarsfeld, the group most prominently included the sociologist Hans Zeisel as well as the motivation research specialists Herta Herzog and Ernest Dichter. Their careers suggest a more transnational understanding of midcentury American consumer capitalism with European – in this case particularly Viennese – influences shaping marketing practices, which consumer historians still often regard as a quintessentially “American” phenomenon of psychological consumer manipulation. Transfers took place on several levels and this and subsequent chapters will analyze the role of individual émigré scholars, of the professional networks they formed, as well as the research concepts and methodologies they developed between Europe and the United States.

This chapter is concerned with the work of focus group-based market research in representing the consumer. Dedicated to generating answers from consumers to questions asked by marketers, focus groups represent a process that requires a series of preliminary steps to physically “convoke” the consumer in the focus group room. Benefiting from the authors' extensive immersion in the field of market research in France, the chapter analyzes these steps from the initial “marketing brief” to the recruiting process to the writing of the discussion guide. During the preparation of focus group sessions, the consumer persona becomes so precisely defined that the moderator's challenge during the actual course of the focus group is to make the “flesh and bones” respondents in the room correspond to the pen-and-paper consumer previously defined. In addition, the focus group device with its concealed backroom frames the marketer who finds himself progressively trained to hear the voice of the consumer in the manufactured discourse of focus groups respondents.

This chapter wonders about the overemphasis placed on consumers in marketing research. It starts from two questions: Is studying consumption exactly the same as studying consumers? Can consumption be understood through consumer behavior only? The emphasis placed on consumers tends to neglect at least two other factors that yet significantly frame the consumption game. The first factor is the supply side. Consumption is shaped by consumers, but also by marketers. As a consequence, if we want to fully understand consumption, we have to study both types of actor; we must research marketing as well as purchasing and consuming. The second factor is that of market objects, devices, and technologies (Callon & Muniesa, 2007). If we really want to account for consumption, we thus have to study the three vertexes of the triangle: we need to supplement the study of consumers with a study of marketers, and the study of consumers and marketers with a study of “market-things” (Cochoy, 2007). The chapter proposes to follow such a view in starting from the latter vertex: through an analysis of the trade press journal Progressive Grocer over the 1929–59 period, and from the perspective of actor-network theory, it shows how many market-things (cans, shelves, turnstiles, magic doors, …) were put in motion and articulated in order to help grocers and consumers behave differently, thus modifying the very actions and identities of consumers and other marketing actors.

This chapter uses the dual roles of participant and outsider to contextualize the production of a particular market research practice, consumer segmentation, in real time. The goal is to show that while consumer segments exist as abstractions (and thus come to have a life of their own within marketing discourse and practice), their constitution and persistence occurs within a messy matrix of social relationships, with attendant obligations, attachments, and desires. This is an examination of ways consumer segmentation practices enmesh and sometimes ensnare those closest to their production and whose persistence is grounded by embedded cultural assumptions about consumption. By focusing on the microcosm of interactions — the phone calls, e-mails, conversations, report texts — it hopes to illuminate the fodder with which practice and ideology are co-constituted in real time.

Promoting and marketing products intended for children's use and consumption takes place within a highly surveilled, emotionally charged moral context. At its heart, the moral question surrounding children's participation in consumer life concerns itself with determining the extent to which the target market (usually specified by age and gender) can be said to be able to behave as knowing consumers. If the child consumer is imagined as willful, even savvy, then suspicion of exploitation is obviated to some extent because the child can be said to have the ability to be a knowing, active decision-maker. Drawing mainly upon published trade materials, this chapter examines how knowledge derived in and from marketing practice, including consumer research, configure notions of the “child” in ways that make marketing to children not only morally palatable but, in some cases, akin to a civic duty. The “child” here — more specifically, the child's perspective — takes on the character of a currency or value to be leveraged so as to secure market share. The marketing of “fun” and “fun foods” serves to illustrate the notion of marketers' commercial epistemologies.

This chapter explains how research and synthesis contribute to innovation in the context of a business problem. After discussing the relationship between design research and marketing research, the text explains how to drive innovation and innovative thinking through translation—enabled by methods of synthesis.

Chapter 5 considers the role that Britannic loyalism played in various facets of everyday life in the UK and the Dominions, exploring developments in the fields of advertising and market research, attempts to promote Commonwealth collaboration in non-fiction film production and distribution, and the politics of post-war patriotic trade campaigns. The dismantling of import controls in the late 1950s and early 1960s led to a revival in patriotic trade campaigns. However, such campaigns increasingly came to be seen as outmoded during these years, jeopardizing trade with growing foreign markets. Moreover, changes in the advertising and marketing industries, and the growth of market research, discouraged businesses from making undifferentiated appeals to national markets. Earlier ideas that consumers across the British World had broadly similar interests and tastes were comprehensively challenged with the expansion of segmented marketing.

This chapter discusses the evolution of hospitality marketing over the past fifty years by reviewing key marketing developments by decade, particularly as seen through the pages of the Cornell Hospitality Quarterly. In the 1960s, developments in technology and marketing drove rapid changes in the hospitality industry. The founding and development of several national hotel chains brought on new standards and dramatically increased competition. From a marketing perspective, promotion was the prevailing theme. In the 1970s, product development and market research were the predominant themes. The trends in the 1980s were revenue management and brand development. The 1990s focused on customer satisfaction and loyalty. In the 2000s, the predominant theme was web marketing, followed by data-driven marketing in the 2010s. The chapter closes by exploring the possibilities that the next decade offers.

This chapter presents a strategic approach to conducting market research that benefits both clients and suppliers, and addresses various tactical factors that lead to miscommunication and misrepresentation on both sides. However, despite outlining how an ideal market research initiative would develop, the chapter also recognizes the roles played by divergent interests, human error, and reputation-based economies in disrupting such development. Within the media industries, market research occupies a more tentative and variable space. The creative nature of the film, television, or digital media “product” offers an initial hurdle for the inclusion of market research. The chapter analyzes the relationship between the market research supplier and the client within the media industries. Dissecting this relationship illustrates how the supplier–client market research relationship can be defined or modelled.

Chapter 5 covers the fundamentals of marketing research. Research is vitally important to organizations, but it is not something many nonprofit organizations feel they can easily afford. This chapter outlines the process so that organizations can do it themselves or know enough to ask the right questions of others doing research for them. This chapter covers the various types of research and the advantages and disadvantages of each. It includes why to do marketing research and what types of questions should be asked. It also includes the role of the Internet—with social media in particular—as important avenues for research and insights. The chapter also includes a section on becoming a learning organization by putting these insights to systemic use.

The conclusion connects themes woven through the previous chapters with the approaches and understandings of present-day children’s market researchers in order to argue that the dynamics of the moral project of childhood continue to inform contemporary understandings and approaches to the child. For one, the rise of the “creative child” in the post–World War II era repeats and extends the elements of taste central to nineteenth-century dynamics surrounding the production of the bourgeois child. As well, mothers continue to be implicated in the fabrication of children’s selves and interiorities largely through the work of provisioning of goods in ways that are responsive to children’s presumed and articulated subjectivities. The kind of child crafted out of an admixture of Christian conception, social class practice, and maternal accountability comprises the essential elements of a contemporary dominant, moral ideal. It is an approach that hopefully invites consideration of its ubiquity across domains rather than its exceptionality.

The chapter explores how, in the late 1970s, Gideon Gartner reinvented industry market research around a novel concept of advisory services provided on a subscription basis to large numbers of technology adopters as well as vendors and investors. The book examines some of the ‘innovations’ introduced by Gideon Gartner which helped constitute this distinctive new body of expertise. This included integrating research and analysis to increase productivity of analysts and developing methods to generate knowledge relevant for action. In place of long technical market reports, Gartner introduced new formats that could be quickly absorbed. Its various knowledge products include the ‘Hype-Cycle’ that tracks the lifecycle of the emergence and establishment of technology fields and its signature output the ‘Magic Quadrant’. The latter are highly influential but, given the impacts of their differential assessments on vendors’ market prospects, are often highly controversial.

This chapter studies the citation trajectory of an individual, which can be understood as tracing the diffusion of an innovation. The Bass model of innovation is widely used in marketing research to investigate the diffusion of new products, and is applied here to intellectual innovation. The Bass equation was inspired by epidemiological models of the spread of contagious disease in closed populations. They describe the cumulative social adoption of a trait. Modelling academic reputations in this way makes it possible to determine how transient or durable they are, and to monitor the ebb and flow of intellectual innovation more generally.

This chapter discusses the transformation of Mass-Observation, under its new leadership, into a commercial organisation mainly involved in market research. Among the projects discussed are research sponsored by newspapers on attitudes to the death penalty and on sexual attitudes and behaviour. While the former relied exclusively on questionnaire responses, the latter used the full range of Mass-Observation methods and was written up in classic Mass-Observation style by the new director, Len England. Eventually, however, he decided not to publish, fearing that by associating Mass-Observation with what might be seen as scandalous material, he would make it more difficult to establish Mass-Observation as a serious competitor to more mainstream market research organisations. Despite this prioritisation of market over social research, however, some attempt was made to continue the latter during the 1950s. The chapter also looks briefly at Harrisson's attempt to revive the original Mass-Observation in the 1960s and 1970s.

This introductory chapter begins with a definition of a focus group discussion including several characteristics that distinguish this research method. It then describes the development and various applications of the method. It briefly summarizes four approaches to using focus group research by their use in academic research, market research, the non-profit sector, and in community-based participatory approaches. It also outlines the strengths and limitations of focus group discussions.

The chapter examines the methods by which industry analysts generate and validate the knowledge that make up their predictions and rankings. A ‘think-tank culture’ within internal research communities is accompanied by increasing resort to formal methodologies and checking outputs driven by a desire to generate defensible knowledge and avoid litigation. The chapter examines the formation of these experts: their recruitment, induction and the evolution of their careers. In Gartner, analysts are selected not just on the basis of their technical knowledge but also their ability to present and defend positions. To enter the firm they must pass the ‘grace under fire’ test. Finally the chapter examines the day-to-day management of this expert labour. Their exceptional knowledge of particular areas frustrates detailed task management. As well as volumes of outputs (‘publish or die’), they are assessed and rewarded in the basis of detailed assessment of client satisfaction and subscription renewal rates.