Market-Driven Thinking: Achieving Contextual Intelligence
Excerpted from "Market-Driven Thinking: Achieving Contextual Intelligence" by Arch G. Woodside. Printed with permission from Butterworth-Heinemann, a division of Elsevier. Copyright 2005. For more information about this book and other similar titles, please visit Elsevier.
Chapter 2: Case Study Research Methods for Learning how Executives and Customers Think, Decide and Act
Why Case Study Research is Useful, Particularly in Industrial Marketing
A substantial portion of research in industrial marketing focuses on the decisions
and the behaviors by individuals and groups within and between organizations
(Woodside, 1992; Woodside and Wilson, 2000). The most frequently
used research method in the field involves sending a mail survey of mostly
closed-ended questions covering 10 to 20 research constructs. The request
usually made is that the questionnaire be completed by one person per firm,
without comparison to any other person's answers. The reported response
rates for such studies typically range from eight to thirty percent.
This dominant logic assumes that the responding individual is willing to
report her own thinking process, the thinking processes of others involved in
the decision process, and the sequence of events that occurred over several
days, weeks, months, or years. The dominant research paradigm assumes that
the research constructs (e.g., role ambiguity, trust, closeness of supervision)
measured on fixed-point scales provide the nuance necessary for capturing
the thinking/doing processes under study.
Yet the scientific literature on thinking concludes that about 95 percent of
thought is subconscious (Wegner, 2002; Zaltman, 2003) and that people have
only limited access to their own thinking processes, not to mention the thinking
processes of others. Consequently, research methods attempting to measure
ongoing thinking (e.g., van Someren, Baranrd, and Sandberg, 1994) and thinking
by the same person using multiple interviews over several weeks (e.g., Cox,
1967; Cyert, Simon, and Trow, 1956; Witte, 1972;Woodside and Wilson, 2000),
methods to bring up subconscious thinking (e.g., Schank, 1999; Fauconnier,
1997), and interviewing the multiple participants involved in the thinking/doing
under study (e.g., Biemans, 1989) not only are particularly useful steps, they
become mandatory if we really want to achieve deep understanding in research
on thinking/doing processes in industrial marketing.
"I Hate Lying Like That"
The operational constructs using closed-ended responses developed by
researchers fail to uncover the deep nuances and dynamic interactions
between thoughts and actions within and between individuals that occur
within industrial marketing contexts. The following story illustrates such
nuances that CSR can capture in ways unlikely to be captured by closed-ended
mail survey responses. The story involves a sales call made by a representative
of an industrial distributor of copiers and printing equipment (this
sales call was overheard by one of the authors who rode in the same vehicle
with the sales rep). During the selling/buying discussion involving the new
purchase requirements, the customer mentioned that the copier purchased
recently from the sales rep was broken again. Both the sales rep and the customer
mentioned that the copier had needed a service technician to repair it
almost every week since it was installed six weeks before. The sales rep
responded to the customer's concern by saying, "I'm sorry you've experienced
so many problems with your new copier. We will get to the bottom of
the situation. It's a fine piece of equipment and we will solve the problem so
it doesn't keep coming up." After getting back in his car, the sales rep
remarked to the researcher, "The copier is a piece of shit; I really hate lying
like that [to a customer]. It's really going to hurt my relationship with the
guy." The sales rep elaborated that a competing distributor carried a line of
copiers that were far superior in performance and reliability compared to his
product line.
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