Response to Viewpoint - ‘The faddish breakouts of ethnography’

Humphrey Taylor

The market research industry is full of `fads’, ideas that have disappeared because they did not work very well.

Response to Viewpoint – 'The faddish breakouts of ethnography'

Humphrey TaylorHarris Poll at Harris Interactive

I was delighted by Clive Boddy's View-point IJMR, 51, 1, for two reasons:

  1. The history of Mass Observation, which started doing what I think we would now call ethnography in the 1930s but slowly changed into a survey research firm because of the limitations of ethnographic methods (by the 1960s Mass Observation was a successful research firm that did very little or no ethnographic research).

  2. The history of our industry is replete with fads – my guess is that 80% of all...

WARC subscribers can sign in to keep reading

Not a subscriber?

Schedule your live demo with our team today

WARC helps you to plan, create and deliver more effective marketing

  • Prove your case and back-up your idea

  • Get expert guidance on strategic challenges

  • Tackle current and emerging marketing themes

We’re long-term subscribers to WARC and it’s a tool we use extensively. We use it to source case studies and best practice for the purposes of internal training, as well as for putting persuasive cases to clients. In compiling a recent case for long-term, sustained investment in brand, we were able to support key marketing principles with numerous case studies sourced from WARC. It helped bring what could have been a relatively dry deck to life with recognisable brand successes from across a broad number of categories. It’s incredibly efficient to have such a wealth of insight in one place.

Insights Team
Bray Leino

You’re in good company

We work with 80% of Forbes' most valuable brands* and 80% of the world's top top-of-the-class agencies.

* Top 10 brands