Abstract:

In the course of preparing a paper that would do justice to the chosen title, one becomes conscious of how broad and relatively unexplored the subject is. The issue of how to get market research used by decision makers has not been a popular topic among researchers. In such a situation, one might forgive the writer who chose to shake the conventional wisdom by putting forward his own prejudices, following this with a debate that merely revealed the prejudices of others. But this would not be progress and will lead to no action. I have chosen, instead, to approach the subject by investigating two areas in market research where some researchers have made substantive progress in implementing market research. The two areas are those relating to continuous market research - panel and audit data, and ad hoc research.