Abstract:

This short and early paper begins this book for two reasons. First, it sets out clearly the correct and productive relationship between the scrupulous and concerned researcher and the decision maker. Second, it shows the way an apparently simple brief from a manufacturer often leads to deeper questions. We can deal properly with these questions only when we look beyond them to the wider experience, the 'more complete service' which the experienced researcher can provide. This is exactly the purpose of this section, to show that the better we understand how the advertisements under development are going to work 'out there' the better we can do the detailed and necessarily limited job of improving them with the help of a few consumer interviews. The techniques in this paper would not be necessarily recommended today, but this sort of involvement is still the best way a researcher can participate.