Barriers to advancing the science and practice of marketing

Abstract

From focus groups to clinical interviews to cognitive, neurological and biological approaches, market research borrows heavily from the behavioural sciences. Borrowing ideas and methods from other disciplines, often with adaptations, while clearly valuable, also brings a significant risk of ‘getting it wrong’. Problems arise when researchers do not follow best practices carefully developed in the originating discipline. To maintain competitive advantage, marketing researchers often ‘black box’ the details of how they apply those procedures of method design and analysis. This lack of transparency provides little evidence that best practices are followed. This, in turn, raises questions about the validity and reliability of the resulting insights and their implications. To illustrate this issue, we examine two domains where there is strong evidence to suggest that current practices are not best (or even good) practices – implicit association testing and neuroscience.

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