Excerpts from:
Paul A. Scipione. Practical Marketing Research. Princeton, NJ: Prometheus Press, 1988,
11th Edition, 2006. Outside the United States, PMR is published by
Springer-Verlag of Heidelberg, Germany.
"I guess I was destined for a career in . . . (1) farming; (2) the military; (3) proctology; or (4) marketing research. And the answer is: number four!
It must have been in my genes. How else would you explain a precocious four year-old kid sitting on the front steps of his house in Tully, New York, making meticulous counts of makes and models of the cars whizzing by on old Route 11, the main drag between Syracuse and Cortland in the days before Interstate 81 bypassed the charming little town. Family elders still brag to anyone who cares to listen that I was the youngest child to ever be able to tell the make and model of any car, even at night. I can recall being able to do my "amazing night work" because American cars still had distinctive hood ornaments 40-plus years ago (who could ever forget the indian chieftan's head that lit up on the front of pre-DeLorean Pontiacs!) and because an ocean of foreign makes - Volkswagen; BMW; Nissan; Mercedes; Subaru, etc. - had not yet muddied up the local automotive landscape.
By 1955 we had moved to Medina, New York. I was still taking local counts on makes of cars, although by then I was using crayons to produce color charts which I then took around to local car dealers trying to sell for a dollar each. This was nearly 20 years before J.D. Power made his fortune doing car surveys! Other than enjoying the process of counting and compiling, my main motivation was making enough money to buy comic books and clandestine packs of Camel unfiltered cigarettes.
I guess it was equally inevitable that as an adult I would become a consumer psychologist. As a boy I took only volumetric counts of cars by make and never questioned owners about why they bought that brand at that dealership. But I do recall doing a survey of car owners around 1960 in the parking lot of the local Tops Super-market. I was in ninth grade then and the survey was for my advanced placement civics class. The Big 3 (General Motors; Ford; Chrysler) had just followed the Studebaker Lark by introducing their own compact cars (Chevy Corvair; Ford Falcon; and Plymouth Valiant, respectively) and I wanted to find out what motivated adults to trade in their gas-guzzling, great-finned hulks for the plain, new compact cars. Was it reverse snobbery, anti-conspicuous consumption? My teacher literally sucked my hub caps on that masterpiece - I was the only kid in the class who got a solid A. Maybe it was no accident that the teacher went right out and bought a sky-blue Valiant, complete with slant-six engine and a fake fifth wheel on the rear trunk lid.
Later on, as a senior in high school, I conducted a nationwide survey by mail for a paper in the honors civics class, among a bunch of glossalalia practicers (speaking in tongues), whom I had met at a summer religious retreat at Hobart and William Smith Colleges while working there as a lifeguard. I admit that it hadn't really been that strange pentecostal religious practice that had attracted my attention. Rather it was the gorgeous young lady from Virginia who had won the wet tee-shirt contest while simultaneously practicing glossalalia. I was willing to make her a sample of one!"
Comments: Truly it must have been fore-ordained that I would be a market researcher, although as a business professor I also believe that good MR persons can also be made. In addition to being a good writer, good speaker and good listener, arguably the most important personal characteristic of a good MR practitioner is that they be intensely curious about what really drives the behavior of consumers.
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"You would be hard pressed to find a field in which computing is as important as MR. Historians can make a case for direct effects that sequential developments in computing have had on how MR has developed. This is just the kind of historical and technological context that is missing from other MR textbooks. Such historical and technological contexts are invaluable in helping future MRPDs (market research project directors) understand how computers can and should be used. Another coup for PMR, right from the very first edition!
From the 10th through 18th century, the abacus was the only way to compute, other than trying to perform calculations in one's head. There are many areas of the world where the abacus is still in daily use. And no batteries are required!
The first mechanical computing device, the Calculating Clock, was developed by Wilhelm Schickard, a professor at the University of Tubingen in Germany in 1623. Unfortunately the original drawings were destroyed during the Thirty Years War. It was three centuries later, during the early 1930s, when technologists were finally able to redraw this fascinating device. Later during the 1600s, a more advanced mechanical calculating device was developed by the French mathematician Blaise Pascal. Another significant development was the concept of logarithms, which in turn made the slide rule possible. Logarithms are also attributed to Pascal, as well as Fermat, another French mathematician.
In 1828 English mathematician Charles Babbage came up with the idea for a calculator that he called the Difference Engine, but he couldn't get it to work. Five years later he was more successful with his Analytical Engine. Its "store" (memory) and "mill" (CPU) presaged the digital computers of the 20th century. Because Babbage's machine also utilized punch cards, in a sense it was the first stored-program device.
The next big development came in the US, the direct result of problems at the Census Bureau in being able to quickly generate statistics using thousands of traditional abacus-equipped statistical clerks. When it took nearly 10 years to process each decennial Census, federal officials decided to hold a contest. Whoever came up with the best system for automating counts for the 1890 Census would win $50,000, in addition to getting a contract for computing equipment. The winner was a young engineer from Buffalo, NY, Herman Hollerith. He built an electro-mechanical card sorting machine that utilized the same punch cards that Babbage's machines had used in England. In addition to his main counting machine, Hollerith also developed a small metal plate in which Census clerks could hold blank punch cards. In the bed of the plate were small indentations at strategic points that corresponded to numbers and letters that were pre-printed on the punch cards just above. Census clerks used a pen-sized stylus to poke holes at appropriate points in punch cards. The cards were then collected, loaded into the Hollerith Machine and then run through vertical electrical-mechanical counters and small circular totalizer wheels. After each processing run, a Census clerk had to glance at the final numbers and record them on a tablet or coding sheet. There were no printers in those days!
The Hollerith System proved an immediate success. Clerks using the Hollerith machines were able to tabulate statistics on the 63+ million Amerians in the 1890 Census nearly five years quicker than the manual tabulations in the 1880 Census had taken, and with fewer workers. Herman Hollerith formally incorporated his company in 1896 and sold out to Thomas Watson, Sr. in 1911. Watson called the merged firms the Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company, a forerunner of IBM."
Comments: Students in my MR course quickly learn that I love both the history of business and technology. It's no accident that MR developed in the United States. It was our diverse population, Industrial Revolution, development of branded products and the new field of advertising, the rise in professional business management and technologies that allowed us to more quickly and inexpensively tabulate market conditions and surveys that led directly to the development of MR as a unique business, a category that now tops $16 billion/year in the United States - more than $50/year for every American.