Abstract:

The "engineering company" referred to in the title is, in fact, one of the very large American-controlled automotive manufacturers with whom I spent some time heading up the market research activity. For a researcher the unique fascination of these American giants is that they combine the aggressive marketing orientation normally associated with the so-called fast-moving consumer market and the fundamental engineering bias of a top management whose major investment decisions are always about very complex and highly-engineered products for sale on a worldwide basis. And because of this unique combination of marketing, engineering, huge investment risks and world-wide markets the value of the market researcher in these organisations has been most visible in the field of product development. My central thesis is that it is possible to develop satisfactory product testing procedures based on consumer field research, the results of which top management will welcome in their decision-taking processes. I hope to demonstrate, very crudely, that it is possible for consumer market research techniques to play an important, and in some cases, decisive role in what is fundamentally an engineering company and in which, in the final analysis, product decisions are taken by engineers