Reflection and Retrospection: Searching for Visions in Marketing

Abstract

In my early years, I was a practical marketing and advertising research analyst. During this time, Lyndon O. Brown's (1937) Market Research and Analysis taught me the power of survey research in coordinating supply to demand. From Brown, I learned how to help managers make marketing decisions on the basis of what the market wanted. Brown's book was also instrumental in making marketing research courses commonplace in business school curricula. Related to this, in 1949, about the time I was thinking about an advanced degree, Robert Ferber's (1949) Statistical Techniques in Market Research appeared to remedy the use of faulty statistical methods in marketing research by advocating, among other things, the replacement of quota sampling with probability sampling. Ferber's book was important to me because it gave me my first exposure to the idea of the quest for in marketing. This meant the application of the scientific method, using sampling and correlation analysis to find the range and limits of relationships. Together, Brown and Ferber gave me a vision of reality testing for finding the truth. Never mind that no one yet knows whether scientific realism or relative truth should be adopted (Hunt 1990); after reading and using Ferber's text, I felt confident that I knew that truth and reality (hypothesis) testing went hand in hand. But those were heady days. Who among marketing scholars today would feel bold enough to say the same? After 50 years of scholarship, I have come to accept that human judgments are situationrelative. Stephen Brown's (1998) Postmodern Marketing Two provides an entertaining exposition of the view that marketing is and always will be an art, the knowledge of which can never be gained by scientific study alone.