For the purpose of this article it is assumed that the decision to carry out market research is well-founded. Nevertheless, examination of the reasons for carrying out the research will help, not only in deciding whether to undertake the project as an in-company project, but also in choosing among several agencies should a decision be made to go outside. It is particularly important to stop to establish the reasons for the research when, as is too often the case, the need for it arises from some crisis. At such times, the urge for action is Paramount and the signals, which in themselves may Indicate the correct decision, may go unnoticed . The wisest cousel then is to stop, do nothing and think: think why is research needed, what information is required and how it will help when it has been obtained. In this way it is possible: to ensure that the problem is correctly analysed and interpreted, and is judged in the context of total operations. Only then can a rational decision be made either to use an existing in-company unit, to set one up if it does not already exist, or to go to an outside agency for help on either a permanent or temporary basis. There are a number of considerations, both internal to the company and external to it, which must be taken into account in making the decision.
Motivation research is a field which has brought into the world of economic hypotheses much that is unusual and unpolished. It is a field that has many opponents and numerous admirers. The debate on the significance of motivation research and on the possibilities of its application will continue. Nothing great was ever born without conflict and so the strength of the conflict indicates the importance of the thing we are dealing with. Further development will show us all the advantages and deficiencies of motivation research as well as the possibilities for its purposeful application.
The quantitive and qualitative productivity of interviews depends upon many factors. To these belong also the interviewers themselves, who under certain circumstances can exercise a considerable influence on the interview situation and on the outcome of the enquiry. The tendency is, in the case of standardised interviews, for the chance or the danger of such influence by the interviewer to be minimised, because in such a case there is no possibility of variation in the putting of the questions and their order. The many problems that nevertheless remain, and the additional difficulties that arise as a result of standardisation are thoroughly discussed on a theoretical basis in the literature. Unfortunately, however, there is a lack, both by number and extent, of practical investigations of this group of questions (or of publication of the results thereof!) that would make it possible to verify, to improve and to evaluate these theoretical questions. In this connection it was interesting to link up with two larger surveys which were carried out under the author's leadership within the framework of the seminar for market and consumer research at the Friedrich-Alexander University at Erlangen-Nuremberg, a detailed questioning of the interviewer (about his experience when interviewing people in Nuremberg - an enquiry into enquiries, in fact), and to evaluate the results .
The existence of the computer influences conceptually as well operationally the design of a marketing information system (MIS) and the application of a MIS the computer mostly is the centre in which all the computer techniques are integrated. This system should, in theory, provide at any time information that is needed to decide on a decision under uncertainty or to manage a marketing department. Up till now business is far removed from this ideal. However, the MIS is a challenge for both marketing management and computer experts.
Our own experiment found no greater tendency for self-completion to yield critical answers: in this respect the two methods of data collection produced results which were very similar indeed. A likely explanation by which this finding can be reconciled with Scott's is the fact that our use of interviewers to recruit informants had the same inhibiting effects as using them to conduct an interview. Informants filling the questionnaire consciously or unconsciously envisaged their replies being read by the interviewer who had given them the questionnaire. Indeed, the similarity between the responses to the two methods of questioning was more remarkable than any differences, and likely to be of more practical significance. The rest of this section goes on to explore the meaning and implications of these divergencies, and to suggest ways of narrowing or widening the gap as appropriate.
Self-completion questionnaires are a basic and much-used tool of the market researcher. Their great attraction is that by avoiding the need to employ a force of trained interviewers they considerably reduce the costs of undertaking a survey. This remains true despite sharply rising postage charges incurred in transmitting questionnaires from the researcher to his informants and back again. In the past, however, the use of self-completion has in the main been confined to questionnaires which have been extremely undemanding of informants. However complex the survey design, and however intricate the analyses performed on the data collected, the questionnaires themselves have normally been very short and very simple. This is, in a sense, paradoxical since the longer the questionnaire the greater the cost saving brought by using self-completion.
Motivation research in the consumer markes is too little used as a systematic means of obtaining information within the framework of marketing information systems. On the other hand it is sometimes used wrongly as ad hoc research of which more is expected than it can give. This arises from the stamp that the pioneers of motivation research impressed upon its development. It was typical of the old concept that the objective of motivation research was too restricted, its range overstated and its function too little distinguished from the methods. The profitability of a marketing information system nevertheless remains far below its possibilities if it does not include a subsystem for the recording and interpretation of motivation data. The conditions for doing this are already met. It is in fact possible (1) to define the psychological standards with which a product or a service must comply in order to create and maintain demand, (2) periodically to test the degree to which these conditions are satisfied by one's own product and those of competitors, and (3) to express the results of such testing in symbols that make possible research into their interplay among all other variables subjected to the test.
For several years now motivational research has been successfully applied to more and more categories of consumer goods, that is, goods consumed by individuals or households. Although it is taking its place more and more frequently in the marketing mix, this technique is still very much outside the realm of industrial products, i.e. those products destined for the manufacturer rather than the consumer: raw materials, semifinished and finished products, industrial machinery. For this kind of product, it is commonly thought that purchases are based on a rational analysis of the manufacturers' needs from which derives a list of the characteristics required: (type, quantity, price, delivery times etc.) This state of affairs is based on the classic distinction between the world of consumer goods where irrational, emotional motivations are predominant and the technical world where the universe is no longer an individual but a rational entity: the manufacturer. In addition, we think that the non-use of motivational research in the world of industrial products derives from ignorance of the possibilities that this technique offers in its modern form.
To date, qualitative research has been used to examine product acceptance and usage, concept testing, and advertising strategy, amongst other things. In the social and environmental fields less use has been made of such methods. In political research almost no qualitative work has been done, particularly as part of a multi-stage research study into political attitudes and behaviour.
Although market research on the sales side cannot be regarded as a reflection of procurement market research, there are nevertheless many similarities. The buyer as market researcher can, in other words, obtain much inspiration from research into the sales market in the realm of survey, processing and evaluation techniques and can borrow much from them.
Very little is to be found in specialised marketing literature on experimentation. As in the sciences in general the earliest steps forward in marketing were made as a result of using methods of observation. Data are collected either within the business concerned or at retailer or at consumer level, and these data are analysed (statistical research, market research, panels, etc.). One very seldom succeeds in this manner in eliminating all the variables that may exert an influence and one has to make use of the resources of multivariate analysis to measure the effects of the facts that one proposes to study. As in the so-called experimental sciences the experimentation should therefore make it possible under certain conditions to arrive more easily at the desired result. In order to measure the influence of the price level of a product it should be sufficient, for example, to vary the price and to measure the sales results and thereby to establish the law relating of consumption to price level.
The election polls as now operated have few prospects to offer. This is also true if we confine ourselves to the causes of error brought about by insufficiencies in the questionnaire and leave out of consideration the purely technical aspect of sampling, i.e . the margins of error which are themselves of uncertain validity. It all hinges upon a questionnaire that has been tested as to its predictive effectiveness . So long as that is not done, election polls will be nothing but a gamble instead of a serious calculation of probabilities . An important hindrance to putting efficacy research into practice is undoubtedly that the customers for election forecasts, that is to say the news media, it must be feared, have as yet. Little comprehension of them and will presumably not be able to afford much towards financing it. But so long as market research organisations continue to regard this sort of research as an attractive form of free publicity, and therefore offer it at low prices, there is unfortunately little chance of an improvement in the climate in this respect.