Editor’s note: Joseph A. Koerner is president of The Qualis Company, a St. Louis research firm.
As researchers, we are, ideally at least, always looking outward, to find answers, to test concepts, to discover "personalities" of products, to identify segments, to measure sales potential, to evaluate advertising.
Last summer a few of our neighbors gathered on a warm Friday evening to see the new deck we had just completed in our back yard. We’ve known our neighbors for a while, and we all know more or less what each of us does for a living. But this evening one of the men, a pilot, said he would like to know more about the business of marketing research, because, he said, "I really don’t have any idea just what you do."
"Rich," I said, "it’s kind of hard to explain without giving you a few examples." So, I told him vaguely about a few recent projects, but I couldn’t really give too much detail because of confidentiality. He seemed somewhat satisfied with my response, and we turned back to our other neighbors sitting on the deck. It turned out to be a spontaneous and pleasant martini evening.
Rich’s question, and my answer, popped into my mind the next day. It was raining, so I couldn’t go out to work in the garden to finish up a few things around the periphery of our new deck. I decided to resurrect an old hobby, and do a little word search. (I still apply some of the skills I had learned long ago studying Latin.) I made the mistake, or had the good fortune, to pull my two volumes of the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) from the book case. My OED is one of these highly compact publications, with four pages reduced and printed on one, so you need a magnifying glass to read it.
I spent more than two hours looking up words and their origins. One word and idea led to another. The words took me down a sometimes cynical path that ended abruptly without warning on a hard rock of insight which a career in this business will not let me disprove. There’s some humor in what I learned, and certainly an abundance of meaning about the pleasures and intellectual challenges of marketing research.
The Oxford Dictionary defines words, cites origins, and gives histories of how words come into use. It is the authority in our language. I started with the basics, and looked up market. Market comes to us through the Latin. The basic verb is mercare, which simply refers to what took place in the markets, that is, trading. This root give us a whole raft of words we use frequently: merchant, mercantile, merchandise, to name just a few. This basic discovery doesn’t tell us a whole lot, except to bring to mind that way back in antiquity people traded items in what became known as markets. The history of the English usage gets a bit more interesting.
One of the first recorded appearances of market as we use it in our professional jargon shows up in what is known as the Coston Chronicles, over 500 years ago, in 1480. Here’s the actual text, in reference to some person who could be one of the first examples of the modern marketing practitioner:
He lete cry thurgh his patent in euery faire and euary market of Englond.
I think this means, in a more contemporary translation, that this man hawked his item, whatever it was, all across England in every place where people gathered to trade goods. Maybe the faires and markets referred to were the first regional malls. I was hooked, and eager to see what other 500-year-old ideas might still be viable for us today.
In a work called The Penny Cycle, XIV (I never found out just what this publication might have been, just that it first appeared in 1839), I found the next observation, which was the first instance of the term market used in an abstract form. I got the idea that some persons by this time had begun to give some conceptual dimension to the practice of marketing:
When the whole bulk of the articles to be sold is brought into the market . . . the market is called a pitched market; when only a small portion is brought, it is called a sample market.
1839 was right in the middle of the Industrial Revolution. Maybe pitched and sample were terms that refer to clothing. By the year 1820 England imported over 70 percent of American exports of cotton. Historians, as we read them in our college days, spent a great deal of time talking about machinery, especially in textiles, and about the growth of international trade. We heard little or nothing about how manufacturers took their goods to market, how they sold them to consumers, how they were distributed, and how decisions were made. But, someone was obviously thinking about this process.
Charles Lamb, the essayist we studied in our English Lit courses (and maybe didn’t appreciate him as much as he deserved) was apparently close enough to the process to see, in 1821, the failing results of poor planning, or perhaps even greed:
They seldom wait to mature a proposition, but e’en bring it to market in a green ear.
We would have to modernize the language a bit, but all of us can think of many notorious examples in our time of what Charles Lamb had in mind. The reference to the green ear calls up images of the agrarian influence in the growth of the role of markets. One gets the idea that the terms used by Lamb reflect what was taking place among his contemporaries. The ancient practice of farmers bringing their produce to town to sell served as the anchor for other products.
About 20 years after Lamb wrote about the green ear, back over here in America, Ralph Waldo Emerson, in his ambivalent yet certain manner, gives the impression that marketing had become a very lively activity, with consequences:
This is the good and this is the evil of trade, that it would put everything into market.
This comment appeared in 1844, in a series Emerson called the Lectures to Young Americans.
About 40 years later, in 1881, back in England, another writer gave the impression, in a publication called Contemporary Revelations, that the study of marketing had taken on some formal aspects:
It is possible that merchants, bankers, etc., should be led astray by the sophism of mercantilism.
That word, sophism, when associated with the activity of the marketplace, sparked a little additional reflection. Sophistry is the pretense of knowledge and insight, stated in a convincing manner. Mostly it means a highly superficial explanation of something. A most discomforting thought for a consultant to ponder. Even more discomforting for the people who pay us to work for them.
There were other words to study. But instead of going right to research, I decided to work through the alphabet. I felt I was on to something in this little secondary research project of mine. I quickly decided that many words in our business are best left to more advanced discussion. Monadic, for example, and multivariate, are rather obvious in meaning after some grasp of the basics. Analysis, however, right at the top of the alphabet, demands attention. The word comes from the Greek, and is probably one of the most descriptive in our whole professional vocabulary. It means to untie or loosen up. These are perfect explanations of what we profess to do with the data we collect. We have to collect data correctly, to be sure, and there are many pitfalls in this aspect of our business. But once we have the data, we untie it, or take it apart. Ideally, we put it back together. Maybe this, I thought, is what I should have told my friend, Rich. "We loosen bundles of information," I could have told him, "and then make it clear and understandable." To think about the analysis, I have learned from experience, is a good way to go about a creating a good research design.
The next work in alphabetical sequence was concept, and it turned out to be most intriguing when applied to the research process. The Latin verb capere means to seize or capture. A concept, therefore, in the mind. It is an idea, a thought, to which we give a shape and a name. The prefix con intensifies the meaning. I remembered hearing about a product manager, who, during a focus group session, became so angry behind the mirror when the participants weren’t "getting it," that he burst into the room and told them exactly what the concept means! It was clear in his mind - he had captured it - but the people in the group didn’t. They didn’t form the same meaning. In spite of my decision to work through the alphabet, I had to jump way ahead to look up perception. To perceive something means, in the word origin of the definition and activity, to take in an idea or stimulus of some kind, from the outside. The prefix (per) is very important here: it intensifies the meaning of taking in something from the outside. So, it was time for reflection again: the core of marketing research may be found in just these two words. Often, the work of marketing research is to find out how to put a concept properly into the perception of another person; or, from another perspective, the task is to learn how to perceive properly what is in the other person’s mind.
The commitment to a search through the alphabet simply waned. I felt like a student cramming for an exam. Words popped into my mind, and I followed them. Proposition was the first, from the Latin ponere, to place, and pro, a prefix meaning, literally, in front of. When you place something in front of someone, even if it is only a concept, not something actual, you are dealing immediately with perceptions.
"What a way to go about it," I said to myself with a somewhat smug smile. "I’m talking about research, using just words, not examples, and it all makes sense."
But there was the rub. It did make sense. We work in our minds. I remembered an important meeting I had with the president of a publishing company as I was getting ready to present the results of a fairly complicated study. "Remember," he said, "to distinguish between reality and perception as you present these results. There is a difference."
"Yes there is," I said, "and it is a perceived difference."
The risk of getting a bit over-academic became evident quickly. We are in a business that requires a lot of mental maneuvering. But it is still a business.
So, accordingly and significantly (it’s hard to avoid using the word - look it up!), I turned to the OED entry for business. Here’s a good old Anglo-Saxon word, with no references into the Latin and Greek. The origin in very early times is bisignes, meaning simply to be occupied with constant attention, engrossed, doing something that engrosses the attention. One of the earliest examples in the English language appears in the following comment in 1612 by a writer named Pasquil, in a text called Night Cap.
Thou hast been too busy with a man, and art with child.
Eventually the word came to refer to a commercial enterprise regarded as a going concern, which is, of course, how we tend to use it today. The earlier meaning, however, seems to describe how marketing researchers go about their businesses, totally engrossed in it, analyzing, generating graphs, drawing implications, finalizing reports, writing recommendations . . .
With the exception of the word research itself I could have ended my probing at this point. I decided to go on, however, at least for a few more words, chosen somewhat randomly.
I was most pleased to learn that focus comes from a Latin word that means hearth or fireplace. Words like this are charming in their history. Today we use the word focus for something we do, analogously, like a fixed gaze, outside of time and space, upon the flames and coals in a fire place. We are drawn to the object itself, isolating it, limiting our vision. A romantic idea. Potentially misleading, too.
Another type of research suggested itself - customer satisfaction. Customer grows out of the word custom (of course!) which is derived from the Latin consuescere, meaning to do things in an established way. The second word in this, the only two-word idea I analyzed, takes us to the essence of this marketing process and matter of continuing concern. The ancient origins - both components of the word stem from way back in the history of recorded language - of satisfaction can give solid direction to the entire process. Satis means, simply, enough; facere means to do or make something. Therefore, customer satisfaction means, literally, to get customers to act in a consistent, established manner by doing enough for them. The job of the researcher is to find out what is enough, and why, and how to do it. Simple, really, but I’ve known automobile dealers who insist that it is impossible to satisfy customers. Here is one outstanding example of this attitude which I actually heard a dealer announce to a group of customers who had been assembled to discuss their experience with the dealership. "I’m here in business to get everything I can out of you, and you’re out to get everything you can out of me when you come in to buy a car."
One of the other problems I have found in recent years in the process of customer satisfaction programs is that too many times people who market goods and services seem to get the idea that only the customer is in charge of the relationship, which leaves the marketing organization in a passive role. That is not the case, in reality. The word satisfaction refers to an activity -- doing enough. Fundamentally, the word means to take control, often to do what is obvious in the first place. Something else usually interferes, if there is dissatisfaction.
It was time for a decision. Do I go on? Look up more words? Look up research? The answer came to me in the question itself - which is what usually happens when we analyze, loosen up, and untie our information. Decision. The word is a challenge in itself. The Latin words are de and cedere -- to cut the knot. Here’s a usage in Shakespeare:
Either end in peace . . .
Or to the place of the difference
Call the swords which must decide it.
(Henry IV, iv,i,182)
All of us who have spent careers in marketing research know what it is to be challenged in our decision criteria. How many decisions are made not out of strength and insight, combined with data, but rather have been based on numbers alone. I’ve been in meetings where numbers alone have prevailed in a decision whether to proceed to the next steps of a product development process. In one instance I wish there had been a fight among the committee members. The issue was to decide on a positioning for advertising (look up that word, too!), based on the numbers. No one seemed to want to break out of the rational and sequential process with the emphasis on the numbers alone. The conversation that followed about advertising quickly grew animated, not because there was a strong conviction about the position (we referred to this word earlier -- to place in front of) that had been selected. There was a lot of money to be committed to the advertising effort, nearly $3 million. What’s exciting in comparison about a $50,000 research project? The research department had nothing further to say in the matter, except to institute one of the formal advertising tests. I learned about six months later that the numbers in the communications test for the proposed ads were so low that the client felt it was necessary to retain another advertising agency.
Now it was time to take the last step, to look up research. I was cautious and a bit concerned what I would find. When I found and read the entry in the OED, I was both stunned and amused. It was like the ironic similarity in Greek drama, where the elements of tragedy and humor are the same. Both are human conditions. Both occur because of something unexpected and at the same time inevitable. The Latin origin for research is circare. It came into English from the French cherchez, which means to search, as we use it today. But, the Latin word means to go around in circles!
So, if I were to give my friend and neighbor Rich the definition of marketing research I might have said this:
"Rich, my business is that of a consultant in marketing research. That means that I am totally engrossed in helping people go around in circles."
Maybe the next time we are sipping martinis on our new deck I’ll lay that on him.
In the meantime, I’ll reflect over what I learned. The words of marketing research brought together old meanings and new insights. I see our business becoming more and more fragmented. Methods abound, models are chosen to make effective decisions, specialists profess high levels of expertise. We know that we really don’t go around in circles, and yet often when we plan our projects and our annual budgets we fall back on precedents. Recently I had a conversation with a client, a director of marketing research in a large company. He had this to say about the future of his department, and about the future of the marketing research professionals who reported to him.
"I find that those people in our department who spend time with marketing and other managers in our company are those who get invited to meetings, who get budgets approved for projects. They know how to talk something through, to get everyone’s perspective. They become part of the team."
It could be well that the ancient origins of research and the other words provide good guidelines for those of us who make our living in this business. The circle idea isn’t a bad one; it does imply getting back to the basics. We might do well to pay more attention to what is within the circles of our research. Have we really used all our capacities in our research? That is, do we use our instincts, our intuition? Do we go out and simply observe behavior?