Bridging the gulf between practitioners and academics - a landmark paper
02 October 2013

Annie Pettit02 Oct 2013

I was recently delighted to overhear a conversation among a number of market research professionals who discussed in great detail and specificity exactly how a question should be worded. The end result was an extremely precise and unambiguous question and set of answers. The secondary result was that any normal person reading that survey was sure to think that Charles Dickens himself wrote it. (i.e., every question fills up a full page) Though market research does need the rigour that academia should teach us, it also needs a healthy dose of real people using human brains. Is academia making any effort to teach us how to combine 'how real people work' with best practices?

Ruth McNeil03 Oct 2013

Interesting point, Annie, about the fine line between the need for lack of ambiguity in the way questions are phrased and yet the, equally strong need, for succinctness! Ideally, we should stress as practitioners that questions need both - precision but also a straightforward use of language, every-day language that means something to respondents. Let us always remember that it is "real people" answering our questions - and best practice means that they need questions they can answer and language they can understand. Thanks for raising the point!

Professor Paul Baines05 Oct 2013

In a piece written for the European Journal of Marketing (see: Baines, P.; Brennan, R.; Gill, M. and Mortimore, R. (2010), “Examining the academic/practitioner divide in marketing research”, European Journal of Marketing, Vol.43, No.11/12, pp.1289-1299), we find that marketing academics and market research practitioners have fairly similar views of the salient characteristics of good marketing research. However, marketing academics have little interaction with marketing practititioners, conduct research on a part-time basis, and revere work that appears in peer-reviewed academic journals (present company excepted of course, dear reader, knowing that you also revere work published in this august outlet). By contrast, market researcher practitioners seem to worry less about methodological minutiae; the key aim of practitioners is to satisfy the research needs of the paying client, making the accumulated research knowledge in academic journals seem irrelevant because it is produced for a different purpose. This brings the discussion to our need to identify and explore ways in which these two groups can more effectively communicate their market research activities to one another, collaborate on projects together (assuming that they can) and more work effectively on areas of common interest. We uncovered some evidence to support the idea that marketing academics have the skills and inclinations pertaining to analysis of longer-term trends and underlying causal mechanisms in markets. Equally, the principal concern of market research practitioners is to provide pragmatic support for short-term decision-making. Clearly this is merely a useful generalisation and exceptions can be found: 3% of the academic respondents in our study reported themselves to be ‘highly active’ in commercial market research and consultancy; 17% of the practitioners said they had written an article for an academic journal. The great majority of marketing academics have either never done any commercial market research, or are currently inactive in this area. Concerning the possibility of greater collaboration between academic and commercial marketing researchers, we would say that our research provides grounds for both optimism and pessimism. Optimistically, we suggest that research academics and research practitioners in marketing hold similar views of what constitutes good research in marketing, and there is evidence of a degree of mutual respect. For example, academics approve of the speed that practitioners publish their findings, and think that they are presented in a readily digestible form; practitioners think that academic research is impartial and conducted professionally. Pessimistically, there is evidence that the two groups run along parallel tracks, both investigating marketing phenomena, but seldom if ever engaging with each other, meeting in their own groups at their own conferences, and communicating within their groups using their own media. Under these circumstances, how might greater engagement between market research academics and practitioners be achieved? We suggest that greater collaboration can be pursued under three headings: mutual comprehension, joint communication, and joint research. Under the heading of mutual comprehension are initiatives such as secondments of academic staff to market research agencies (I personally spent time with Sir Robert Worcester and the elections unit at MORI in 2005), and of research practitioners to academic departments (Roger Mortimore at Ipsos MORI is now quite rightly also a part-time full professor at Kings College London, internships (of PhD students at market research agencies), and greater cross-fertilisation between academic and practitioner conferences. These are inexpensive activities that essentially require the will to do them, plus a little time and money. Secondments and internships need be for no longer than a few weeks for mutual comprehension to improve and for personal networks to be formed. Joint communication involves purposeful activity to increase the frequency with which academic results are reported in the preferred media of practitioners, and the frequency with which the practitioner perspective is represented in academic journals. Such initiatives are neither particularly time-consuming nor costly. However, the third possibility – joint research – is more problematic. In principle, this may be no more than a call for a European version of the American Marketing Science Institute, which describes itself as “a learning organization dedicated to bridging the gap between marketing science theory and business practice” (MSI 2008). In practice, this would be much harder to accomplish, involving far greater investments of time and money. For the moment, we would suggest that this is a long-term aspiration that would be facilitated if the medium-term, and quite feasible, aims of mutual comprehension and joint communication were put in place. (This is an excerpt from the paper cited at the top of this post.) Professor Paul Baines Cranfield School of Management

Ann-Marie Greensmith02 Apr 2014

I read Peter Mouncey's article with interest, as I asked a question on this topic at a recent IQCS meeting i.e. whether there are any actual Batchelors degrees etc in market research available in the UK. The sheer size of the industry would suggest that there should be and yet there seems to be an unnatural divide. We try to bridge the gap ourselves where we can (at Kudos Research), employing freelance quant and occasionally qual interviewers who are studying for business/marketing degrees. It can be extremely instructive for them to have experience at the data collection 'coal-face', and can provide invaluable insight into the tripartite remit of a questionnaire - namely, to answer the client brief and also be clear both to the respondent and (where telephone or F2fF is concerned)to the interviewer. We also get very good feedback about this experience when we offer it to Trainee Research Executives within our group, who get the opportunity to cut their teeth in the fieldroom and talk to real respondents on the phone. My personal role at Kudos is that of questionnaire 'doctor' - I proof and (usually!) improve every questionnaire we receive for scripting, and try thereby to ensure logic and clarity for all concerned, in terms of the question texts and the data. This role developed from Quality Control experience (along with 20 years' exposure to MR as a researcher and in management of data collection). Although experience is a vital element of my role, there are enough elements of it that that can be taught and demonstrated. I wonder if many of them are actually being imparted by professors and other teaching staff?