Market Research Matters

Market research does matter, contend the authors, but all too often it ends up relegated to the corporate back burner. That's because typical research methods describe a product's past and present without contributing compelling information about its future. Aiming to rectify that situation, longtime practitioners Duboff (a vice president at Mercer Management Consulting) and Spaeth (president of the Advertising Research Foundation) offer a number of well-presented, time-tested techniques for gauging the future. Their goal, they write, is to ensure that decision makers will demand more from their researchers "and the researchers will meet the challenge."