When good researchers go bad: cautionary tales from the front lines
Stephen NeedelAdvanced Simulations, LLC, United States
INTRODUCTION
The proliferation of scanner data in the 1990s allowed marketing research to shift its emphasis to what we might call marketing efficiency. Most of the things we researched in the 1990s were not about building strong brands and delivering to consumer needs. Instead, we were focused on optimizing our marketing actions, our logistics, and our research. The growth and popularity of store-based scanner data and household panel data permitted us to relegate the immediate consumer to secondary status; we interpreted consumer...