Viewpoint: A productive future for research

Nick Coates and Simon Lidington

A short paper on what the authors see as a "substansive shift in emphasis" among market researchers - driven by the digital revolution and the growing popularity of neuroscience-based techniques - away from reducing real-life findings to a neat, "containable summary" and towards these real-life emotional responses, with all their "messiness".

A productive future for research

Nick Coates

Promise Corporation

Simon Lidington

The Exchange Partnership

Market research has long been buffeted by two opposing modes of practice and, ultimately, belief: the exploration mode (typified by grounded theory and Einstein’s observation ‘if we knew what we were doing we wouldn’t call it research’) and the evaluation mode. Neither has sat very comfortably alongside the other and industrialisation, coupled with the cost of data gathering, has made the latter way of thinking about research predominate.

However, we think we’re now seeing a substantive shift in emphasis. The drivers or...

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