The history of marketing research spans different phases: its early history, the emergence of the field from the Industrial Revolution to 1925, improvement in poll and survey methodology (1925—1960), and the Information Revolution (1960—present). During the Information Revolution, technology's march from mainframe to personal computers fueled an amazing number of subtechnologies adopted by marketing researchers. Statistical packages reinvented the way data are entered, processed, and analyzed. Databases, spreadsheets, data warehouses, and data marts combined with data mining and expert systems to facilitate marketing intelligence, marketing information systems, and decision support systems. The Internet profoundly transformed the way we think about communication with participants, collection of data, and project speed.
In the present technology-rich era, electronics and software have transformed all phases of the research process. Computer- delivered questionnaires use organizational intranets, participants' e-mail, Web sites, Usenet newsgroups, or Internet chat rooms. Telecommunication technologies enhance videoconferencing and qualitative research. Devices and their software drivers have generated CATI, CAPI, CARD, and a host of other applications. Optical mechanisms, bar codes, point-of-sale terminals, GISs, and numerous other innovations have transformed the landscape of marketing research. By quickly adopting the technology as it becomes available, marketing researchers have made great strides expanding the scope of the field. Research has proceeded in advertising and media, brand evaluation and choice, buyer and consumer behavior, channels of distribution, new products, pricing, sales force analysis, strategy and planning, measurement and scaling methods, and statistical methods. Practitioners of the art and science continually seek ways to improve professionalism and add value to their organizations, thereby making them more relevant to senior management. Current efforts center on how to make the marketing research function pivotal in setting corporate strategy.
The structure of the marketing research industry can be described in terms of internal or external suppliers to the firm. Internal research suppliers range from one-person operations, to small-staffed operations that do some survey or qualitative studies, to large-staffed divisions that more closely approximate the structures of external research companies. External research suppliers may be further categorized by the depth and scope of services they provide. This group is composed of full-service firms including custom and proprietary methodology researchers; specialty marketing research firms including methodology specialists, companies engaged in subsets of the research process, syndicated data providers, omnibus researchers, and communication agencies; consultants; and trade associations representing general marketing and marketing specialties. Each contributes in its own way to the overall industry and conducts or sponsors research to expand the client's knowledge base.
