Gerald Zaltman

Relationships between Providers and Users of Market Research: The Dynamics of Trust within and between Organizations

The authors investigate the role of trust between knowledge users and knowledge providers. The kind of knowledge of special concern is formal market research. Users include marketing and nonmarketi...

FACTORS AFFECTING TRUST IN MARKET RESEARCH RELATIONSHIPS

Building on previous work suggesting that trust is critical in facilitating exchange relationships, the authors describe a comprehensive theory of trust in market research relationships. This theor...

Social marketing: an approach to planned social change.

Can marketing concepts and techniques be effectively applied to the promotion of social objectives such as brotherhood, safe driving, and family planning? The applicability of marketing concepts to...

Consumer Researchers: Take a Hike!

Consumer research needs broader intellectual peripheral vision. This requires learning to see relevance in seemingly distant fields and taking ignorance as a friend. A particularly challenging but highly relevant topic concerns the (un)conscious mind and the essential unity of body, brain, mind, and society. The two books discussed here are exciting journeys into the biology of the (un)conscious mind and how it is ultimately shaped by society. Copyright 2000 by the University of Chicago.

Measuring multiple buying influences

Abstract In this article, we review existing measures of influence in buying centers, and describe the development of a new measure of influence. Next, we report the psychometric properties of the new measure as assessed in a field study involving joint purchase decisions. The results suggest that the measure has very encouraging reliability and validity, and is likely to be very useful in future research on buying centers.

Organizational buying behavior: Hypotheses and directions

Abstract This paper presents some highlights drawn from a two-day workshop on organizational buyer behavior cosponsored by the Graduate School of Business, University of Pittsburgh and the American Marketing Association. The highlights are presented in the form of ideas which are both deserving and in need of further exploration. The highlights are the collective ideas of the participants as interpreted by the authors from conference transcripts. No formal papers were presented; however, some participants contributed papers which were circulated in advance of the workshop. These papers are highly recommended for reading and are being reprinted (Bonoma and Zaltman, forthcoming; see listing at the end of this paper).

Toward a New Marketing Science for Hospitality Managers

A New Marketing Science (NMS) is proposed that can dramatically improve a firm’s marketplace performance. The NMS challenges managers to dare to think and act differently. It generates deep insights into the thoughts and actions of both customers and managers and how the two mind-sets interact. As several examples illustrate, it departs from the “old” marketing science by its emphasis on imagination, knowing how and why a practice works, understanding the total customer experience, and focus on effectiveness over efficiency. The NMS is grounded in principles from the behavioral sciences and humanities such as the importance of the unconscious mind, the way mental frames serve as interpretative lenses, the centrality of emotions, the reconstructive nature of memory, and the importance of metaphor for learning about and influencing choices.

Are You Mistaking Facts for Insights?: Lighting up Advertising's Dark Continent of Imagination

December 2014 JOURNAL OF ADVERTISING RESEARCH 373 INTRODUCTION Peter Drucker had a famous truism: The purpose of a business is to create a customer. What is more central to customer creation than advertising? This is where firm and customer minds meet, and the mind of the market is established. And what is more central to the success of this meeting than the quality of insights that enter communications strategy and execution? Yet in the author’s ongoing in-depth interviews with marketing executives, managers, and researchers, imaginative thinking is cited as advertising’s dark continent—its Achilles’ heel. Quality research also is described as “essential.” Having deep insights from customers is the basis for creating deep insights about them. Fortunately, data capture and processing procedures always are improving. Methods for eliciting and encoding conscious and unconscious customer thought and behavior are increasingly sophisticated and revealing. Data indeed are becoming “big” in many ways. Do corresponding advances exist, however, in the practice of generating big insights? It appears not. A senior executive in a pharmaceuticals company summarized what many others say: “A problem has to become really ugly before [brand teams] will question how they are thinking [about it] and how they are using their [market] research.” An automotive parts executive, commenting on the use of research in his firm, added, “These guys are afraid of shadows. They avoid gray areas. Data have to be black and white. If it is only suggestive, they won’t touch it.” The ideas in this essay involve insight development. They are based in part on hundreds of ZMET (Zaltman and Coulter, 1995) interviews conducted over time with bold-thinking executives, managers, and researchers. The interviews focused on the development of insights involving messy, illstructured problems. One central idea that emerges is the need to avoid premature reflective closure. This is the tendency to treat facts as insights and leap directly from data to action. It is common when research is used to prove points rather than as fuel for imaginative insight.

Barriers to advancing the science and practice of marketing

ABSTRACT From focus groups to clinical interviews to cognitive, neurological and biological approaches, market research borrows heavily from the behavioural sciences. Borrowing ideas and methods from other disciplines, often with adaptations, while clearly valuable, also brings a significant risk of ‘getting it wrong’. Problems arise when researchers do not follow best practices carefully developed in the originating discipline. To maintain competitive advantage, marketing researchers often ‘black box’ the details of how they apply those procedures of method design and analysis. This lack of transparency provides little evidence that best practices are followed. This, in turn, raises questions about the validity and reliability of the resulting insights and their implications. To illustrate this issue, we examine two domains where there is strong evidence to suggest that current practices are not best (or even good) practices – implicit association testing and neuroscience.

On Becoming a Social Scientist: From Survey Research and Participant Observation to Experiential Analysis

This autobiographical analysis of the many difficult issues, dilemmas, choices, and adjustments involved in becoming a social scientist highlights the strengths and limitations of two principal research methods: survey research and participant observation. It emphasizes how these research methods are actually experienced, in contrast to how they are ideally described in texts.