One reason market research gets a bad name is because of bad research.
I’m reading a book “Hey Whipple, Squeeze This”, by Luke Sullivan, a big-agency copywriter, and a disciple of William Bernbach. From the start he rants about marketing being more art than science, and about research killing good ideas. It was Bernbach who famously said:
Advertising is fundamentally persuasion and persuasion happens to be not a science, but an art.
When you look at what exactly Sullivan complains about – and he complains in detail – what he is complaining about is BAD research. Meaning research based on methodologies that don’t work, or are improperly applied or misused.
Like focus groups.
It’s as though someone complained that all vehicles are bad, because some of them are of poor quality.
I think what is going on here is marketers who don’t know research don’t distinguish between one form of research and another.
Let’s stamp out bad research.
