Very practical reasons account for the introduction of motivation research in-the field of market study. When it becomes desirable to influence consumer behaviour and attitudes, a simple assessment is no longer adequate and there is an obvious need for a deeper knowledge of their roots. The word motivation expresses this concept of psychological causality. But the very concept of causality is by no means a simple one, as many Western thinkers have repeatedly observed. Aristotle felt that it was necessary to distinguish between four kinds of causes. In modern times, Malebranche and Hume have demonstrated that in the realm of psychology as well as in physics , we are utterly unable to comprehend the effectiveness of a given cause, and that, however vivid, our spontaneous intuitions of causality are hollow and meaningless.
The modern advertising agency does not create any advertisement in a vacuum. It ensures that everything published by its clients is part of an integrated marketing operation - whether it is an advertisement in any of the major media, point-of-sale material for use in the shops, sales aids used by the company's salesmen, or references to the product in editorial columns of newspapers and magazines. Every day increases our knowledge of the size and nature of the market for most forms of consumer goods and of the parts played by the leading brands in each product group. Advertising agencies rely on conventional research - often obtained from, a subscription service from independent research organisations to, provide the bare bones of their marketing plans. The various techniques for studying the motives for consumer action form the second stage of research in developing the marketing theme and, particularly, the creative approach.
Purchase periodicity is a problem of simple mathematic, but the remembrance kept by the buyer is a psychological problem in the sense of "uncertain knowledge and fragmentary of human mind facilitating our affinity with other men.
Nowadays, it has become a trivial matter to note that the techniques of market studies have historically their first development. In the search by the industrials for a better profitability of their public expenditure. In the many studies which continue to be carried out in many countries of the world to determine the type of problem in which a technique for the study of markets is being carried out, advertising is still in good rank. The amounts spent by industrial and commercial companies in advertising are such that they can easily support the implementation, often expensive, of techniques likely to greatly increase their efficiency. It is not certain, however, that this close connection of advertising as such and of market research techniques has helped to make it clear to the industrialists that good publicity is impossible outside the systematic study of technology. The distribution process in which it has been developed has essentially helped, and this is not insignificant, to understand that techniques existed which allowed the approach of a problem of advertising with precision, equal (or which tended to become), to that which they required of their services in the approach of a financial, administrative or production problem. These techniques have, most of the time, and put at the service of problems spatially advertised, and have served too rarely to highlight the relationship between an advertising effort and the overall effort of distributing a product.