The trouble with research - respondents

14/August/2002

The book, published by Wiley, price £19.99, is an expanded version of a paper he presented at the Market Research Socoety conference in Brighton in March 2000. It is subtitled Bananas, Business and the Death of Marketing. Why bananas? Because Earls takes as his starting point the ludicrous spectacle of a plain banana encased in a transparent plastic case and labelled "fresh banana snack."

It also enables the publishers to put an amusing banana logo on the jacket of the book and at the beginning of every chapter. Some people would call that marketing.

The author's intention, as stated in his introduction is "to demolish many of the myths of marketing." He contends that the Marketing Age is due to be succeeded by the Creative Age, in which ideas become the most important things in business, though he does not lay down any set of rules to which those ideas should conform.

At the core of the book is a critique of market research, defined as the set of tools invented to meet the demand by leaders of the Marketing Revolution for knowledge about what consumers want and how far their wants have been satisfied.

Unfortunately, says Earls, "customers can't help you much. Their opinions are largely irrelevant because opinions are a function of what they have done in the past. They are not a precondition or reliable indicator of what they will do."

Again "ask/answer can only access the conscious part of their experience. Which would be fine if that was where decisions were made, but it isn't." There is also the problem that 'respondents bias their responses depending on the context - they often tell the interviewer what they think the interviewer wants to hear."

Earls is not, however, dismissive of all market research. He certainly shows no hesitation in quoting its findings when they suit his purpose. For example: "Research done among money-traders in the City shows that, for all the real-time information racing on to their screens, they use their intuition to decide when or what to sell or buy." (This was a conclusion based on direct observation rather than on replies to a questionnaire.)

In another passage he describes how a former colleague at St. Luke's ad agency working on the Clarks Shoes account interviewed people about their reasons for buying shoes. She got sensible, utilitarian answers but then forced the same people to open their wardrobes and reveal that their actual buying behaviour was far more pleasure-oriented.

Earls tries to debunk the marketing hype surrounding brands. He bases his approach on the work of Professor Andrew Ehrenberg, who "has stimulated a new consensus: by and large most, if not all, of the stuff we find in the large box marked 'consumers' image of the brand' is in fact the result (not the cause) of being a user or non-user."

He also writes approvingly of Mike Hall, who "has shown that the most likely advertising research measure to move in the real world (as opposed to the laboratory of pre-testing) is...'advertising salience' - the sense I get that this company is doing quite a bit of noticeable advertising these days."

Earls, 41, has spent his whole career on the planning side of ad agencies, including Boase Massimi Pollitt and St. Luke's, which gave him a sabbatical year in which to write this book.

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