A Data Factory in the Middle of Storyville?
Preparing the market research industry for the dream economy Jonathan Fletcher, Citigate DVL Smith“The unconscious depth messages of ads are never attacked by the literate, because of their incapacity to notice or discuss non-verbal forms of arrangement and meaning. They have not the art to argue with pictures”. (Marshall McLuhan)Introduction As products and services become more standardised and consumers’ needs more differentiated, the imaginative ‘halo’ that surrounds a product or service – the ‘stories’ that are elaborated around the core offering by marketing communications – grow in importance. In recent years the role of market research in the marketing communications process has come in for criticism from a number of directions. Agencies have claimed that researchers don’t offer constructive criticism, merely pass or fail tests; clients echo this complaint, claiming that researchers are unable to diagnose shortcomings in executions in sufficient detail to indicate how they might be improved[1]; and from within the research camp itself it has been claimed that the model of communication we work with in pre-testing and adtracking is flawed[2].