A Personal Salutation to a Dear Friend, Robert F. Lusch

This manuscript is a personal tribute to a dear friend, a leading marketing researcher, theorist, scholar and educator of our time, Robert F. Lusch. For many, professionalism, leadership, conceptual formulation and service define Bob’s career. But, for those who knew Bob well, these traits were an extension of his more private personal persona. I am among those colleagues who had a strong personal friendship with Bob for more than forty plus years. For us, Bob was supportive, loyal, caring, etc., but also adventurous, inquisitive and intellectually challenging. It is these traits that made him an intriguing and enduring friend. This is my reflection of a life-long friendship.

The changing role of the marketing researcher in the age of digital technology: Practitioner perspectives on the digitization of marketing research

After years of hype, marketing researchers are now facing the challenge of integrating new digital technologies into their work. Based on an analysis of 44 key informant interviews with marketing research practitioners, the study develops a framework to describe the main benefits and challenges of digital technologies in marketing research, as perceived by marketing researchers themselves. It highlights successful strategies that have been employed to exploit digital technologies and suggests that the role of the market researcher is changing in the age of digital data. The marketing researcher of the future must fulfill the roles of being a social scientist and a storyteller. In both cases, although researchers may need to develop technical skills, it is also essential that they develop the ability to engage their clients, add value, and interpret data. Implications for industry and academia are discussed.

Marketing Research: Current State and Next Steps

We highlight the current state-of-the-art and identify trends that are likely to shape the role of marketing research in the future. We discuss the growing importance of marketing research and some of the factors that are driving its importance. The redefinition of the marketing researcher and the line of demarcation between marketing research and marketing management, and thus the distinction between marketing researchers and marketing managers, that is becoming thinner and thinner, is described. The sheer availability of secondary data is driving their importance. In a paradigm shift, more and more marketing research is and will be undertaken as part of normal on-going business operations, rather than in response to specific marketing problems or opportunities.

Ethical Criteria in Marketing Research

here are many different ethical theories that have been developed over the years by a number of philosophers. An overview of these theories, their strengths and weaknesses and how they can be applied by a marketing researcher to make decisions are presented in this paper. While the above theories all have pros and cons, ethical decision-making models, which are descriptive in nature, come into play. A few leading ethical decision-making models are presented, laying the foundation for a descriptive model for ethics in marketing research, that is developed further. The proposed theoretical model is backed up with an empirical example of marketing research.

Online Surveys in Marketing Research

In a recent article on conducting international marketing research in the twenty-first century (Craig & Douglas 2001), the application of new (electronic) technology for data collection was encouraged. Email and web-based data collection methods are attractive to researchers in international marketing because of low costs and fast response rates. Yet the conventional wisdom is that, as some people still do not have access to e-mail and the Internet, such data-collection techniques may often result in a sample of respondents that is not representative of the desired population. In this article we evaluate multimode strategies of data collection that include web-based, e-mail and postal methods as a means for the international marketing researcher to obtain survey data from a representative sample. An example is given of a multimode strategy applied to the collection of survey data from a sample of respondents across 100 countries.

Marketing Researcher Ethical Sensitivity: Conceptualization, Measurement, and Exploratory Investigation

Theoretical models of marketing ethics propose that people first must perceive the presence of an ethical issue before the process of ethical decision making can begin. Through the concept of ethical sensitivity, the authors explore why some marketing researchers and not others recognize and ascribe importance to the ethical content in their decision situations. The authors examine two rival definitions of ethical sensitivity and develop a measurement procedure capable of discriminating between them. The procedure then is tested on two populations (marketing students and marketing research practitioners), and several determinants of ethical sensitivity are investigated. Results indicate that the two definitions of ethical sensitivity are empirically equivalent. Furthermore, results show that the ethical sensitivity of marketing researchers is a positive function of organizational socialization and perspective taking, but a negative function of relativism and formal training in ethics.