When I'm writing a case history for this magazine, one thing I like to discuss is the working relationship between researchers and their suppliers. Cooperation between the two parties is as essential to successful research as the right methodology and the right sample. Disagreements and power struggles may sometimes be inevitable but they can be overcome - indeed, they must be overcome. After all, there are thousands (or even millions) of dollars at stake.

A crucial component of that cooperation is trust. A recent working paper from the Marketing Science Institute (MSI), documents the growing importance of trust between research users and suppliers, and various characteristics that inspire confidence. MSI is a Cambridge. Mass.-based non-profit organization of business people and academics who investigate marketing and marketing-related issues.

The report, "Relationships Between Providers and Users of Market Research: The Role of Personal Trust," was written by Christine Moorman, assistant professor of marketing, University of Wisconsin-Madison; Rohit Deshpande, professor of marketing, Dartmouth College; and Gerald Zaltman, professor of marketing, Harvard University.

The authors sent questionnaires to more than 1,700 market research users in major companies across the country, seeking insight into the following questions:

  1. What factors most strongly enhance building and maintaining a trusting relationship between marketing researchers and users: characteristics of individual researchers (e.g., expertise, sincerity, integrity); of the user firm (e.g., corporate culture, structure); or of the research project (e.g., strategic importance)?
  2. How does trust work to enhance the use of market research information?
  3. How does trust affect user/researcher interaction? The respondents came from three groups:

    • Marketing managers, including marketing VPs and brand managers, who were asked to comment on research relationships with internal and external market researchers.
    • Marketing researchers within firms, who were asked to evaluate their relationships with external researchers.
    • Non-marketing managers, including engineers and R&D managers, who were asked to evaluate their interactions with internal researchers

Consultants and other outsiders

Recent trends, the authors point out, have intensified the importance of trust between researchers and suppliers. More firms are hiring consultants and other outsiders to help wade through scanner data and other byproducts of the new information age. "As information technologies improve, research data relevant to a broad spectrum of marketing decisions is becoming available to any firm that desires it and has the ability to pay for it. Now and in years to come, sustainable competitive advantage will depend less on having information and more on effectively using information," the report states.

In addition, downsizing has forced companies to look to outside suppliers for research help, bringing confidentiality issues to the fore and making it difficult for users to develop long-standing relationships with a single supplier. And more and more non-researchers are using marketing research information, which means they must depend on the insights of their provider.

Most important: integrity

Not surprisingly, the MSI folks found that researcher integrity is the most important factor contributing to user trust. Research users had the most confidence in those researchers they felt brought high personal standards to their work. Other trust-enhancing characteristics included confidentiality, sincerity, tact and timeliness. Researchers who would not divulge findings to competitors, were tactful when reporting embarrassing research results, and were sincere and honest in making promises, earned greater trust.

The two most important professional characteristics were expertise and willingness to reduce uncertainty, defined as the "ability to use experience to fill in the gaps left by research results and to provide convincing interpretations of inconclusive data."

More congenial, less trustworthy?

Interestingly, the research found a negative relationship between researcher congeniality and trust. The more congenial a researcher is, it seems, the less trust he or she earns. According to the report, "Past research has typically found a positive relationship between sources' courtesy, friendliness, or likability and the extent to which they are trusted. Perhaps because users view market research as a 'science' and researchers as 'scientists' rather than business people, they may not consider congeniality a particularly important or valuable trait in a researcher. An overly congenial researcher may cause users to question the researcher's skills and knowledge."

The user firm's structure and culture, and project characteristics have less to do with enhancing trust - with a few exceptions. If researchers held more power in an organization, trust was higher. Trust was lower when researchers reported directly to brand or product managers (as opposed to higher-ranking marketing managers).

Interaction quality

The effect of trust is hard to pinpoint, the study showed, and drifts into a fuzzy area the authors call "interaction quality."
 
This quality is measured through five "yardsticks": handling of disagreements, insight production, strategic understanding, customer orientation, and productive interaction.

To wit: "When users believe that their researchers handle disagreements in a productive manner, when their meetings with researchers produce novel insights, when the researcher displays a sound strategic understanding of the user's business, when researchers are customer-oriented, and when researchers make interactions with users productive, users are most likely to trust their researchers and to use the market research that they produce."

Granted, finding someone who embodies all these traits isn't the easiest task (Mother Teresa comes to mind, but I don't think she's added market research to her list of good works). But it's well worth the search, since the payoff could be huge. As the report states: "Management decisions are only as good as the knowledge on which they are based. A strong, trusting relationship between research users and providers can help ensure that the knowledge underlying marketing decisions will be valid and reliable."

That, I trust, says it all.