Q is Accounting for Tastes
Marten Brouwer University of Amsterdam
The story of the failure of the grandiose Ford Edsel is well known. A less well-known detail of the story is that, in the Boardroom (before the Edsel was launched), advertising consultant William Stephenson had been the only one to stand up and speak out against it. He did so on the basis of a Q study he had conducted. Q methodology had been invented by himself in Great Britain in the thirties; his major book on Q was published in his Chicago period (Stephenson, 1953); and his main...