Back in June I had the pleasure of attending the 2000 conference of Canada’s Professional Marketing Research Society (PMRS) in Toronto. Along with coworkers Dan Quirk and Evan Tweed, I manned the booth at the conference’s accompanying trade show and met a number of nice people. Some were readers who stopped by to say hi; some were folks who had never heard of us before and who subsequently wanted to find out just what or who a Quirk is.
It was quite a fun time. The show had a palpable feeling of enthusiasm, some of which may have been due to the fact that it was the organization’s 40th birthday. (The Canadian government even declared it Marketing Research Week in Canada...but maybe they do that every year.) The progams I sat in on were well-attended and informative, and, most importantly, the food was plentiful (especially appreciated were the mid-morning and mid-afternoon snacks, which provided needed energy boosts as mealtime caffeine doses waned).
One of the more interesting presenters was Richard Peddie, president and CEO of Maple Leaf Sports & Entertainment, who talked about the extensive use his organization makes of research, for everything from talking to Maple Leaf hockey season ticket holders and corporate partners to interviewing members of the press in an effort to improve media relations.
Jeff Swearingen, vice president of marketing, Hostess Frito-Lay Company, gave an entertaining and engaging talk about his company’s efforts at managing brand equity globally using a "glocal" approach. That is, adapting advertising to deliver a common set of brand and marketing messages to a local audience. In the instance Swearingen cited, an ad campaign used a national sports hero in each country to deliver the same humorous message about the lengths to which people will go to get their favorite potato chips. The company benefited from having a strong, easily-communicated message that was readily translatable into a number of languages.
One of the recurring themes, both in the progams and in conversations at the show, was the uneasy relationship between the U.S. and Canada. Canadians, wrestling with the effects of U.S. influence on its culture, economy and way of life, are justifiably wary of further encroachment from the south. Add the Canadian dollar’s slumping value and the ill health of Canada’s NHL hockey teams (and the resulting threats to move the teams to U.S. cities), and you’ve got a recipe for a national identity crisis.
In my experience, Canadians are a gracious and goodhumored lot. But I think they may be running out of patience. You can’t really blame them. We Americans tend to be a pushy lot, and with ourTV shows, movies, music, and consumer products streaming north, it’s no wonder Canadians are feeling overrun.
And there we were, staff members of a U.S.-based marketing research magazine making a first visit to a Canadian marketing research industry event, trying to increase awareness and expand our market. But far from Nving us the cold shoulder, the show-goers and organizers made us feel quite welcome.
I’m already looking forward to going back next year - assuming they haven’t closed the borders by then.
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While at the PMRS show I obtained a copy of a new book, Marketing Research: State-of-the-Art Perspectives, edited by Chuck Chakrapani. The book’s stated objective is to "provide a solid and authoritative introduction by a team of experts to marketing research as it is practiced at the beginning of the third millennium."
It succeeds extremely well in doing so. Its 23 chapters are partitioned into secrions on the various aspects of marketing research (gathering data, analyzing data, etc.) and each chapter focuses on a specific research task. Some examples: The always-informative Naomi Henderson of RIVA Market Research contributes a whirlwind to.ur through qualitative research, its past, present and future. Packaging research veteran Howard Moskowitz, president and CEO of Moskowitz Jacobs Inc. writes on product and package testing. Other chapters deal with market segmentation, international research, sampling techniques, multivariate techniques, and more.
The information here is dense and thorough (I’m still making my way through its 600-some pages...hopefully I’ll finish before the fourth millennium edition hits the shelves) and makes the book a worthwhile reference.
One area the book doesn’t cover in-depth is customer satisfaction research. If you’re looking for a book that tackles CSR with a similarly rigorous approach, Derek Allen and Tanniru Rao of Market Probe, Inc., have written Analysis of Customer Satisfaction Data. While the bulk of the book naturally focuses on the data analysis, the authors have also included sections on scale selection, survey instrument design, and how to handle missing data. With chapter rifles like "Causal Modeling: Multiple Dependencies in Path Analysis," the book isn’t for the faint of heart (you’d best have a colleague or research supplier nearby with a background in statistics for reference). But if you need some expert insights on examining the f’me points of your customer satisfaction project, this book is for you.
Marketing Research: State-of-the-Art Perspectives (666 pages) edited by Chuck Chakrapani, is published by the American Marketing Association in conjunction with the Professional Marketing Research Society.
Analysis of Customer Satisfaction Data (245 pages, $55), by Derek Allen and Tanniru Rao, is published by Quality Press. For more information call 800-248-1946 or visit http://qualitypress.asq.org.