Remember when...

40 years in marketing research

Editor’s note: Jim Nelems is CEO of The Marketing Workshop, Inc., a Norcross, Ga., research firm.

Although marketing research is a relatively new industry, as industries go - having been around for less than 100 years - it has not been immune to drastic changes over the last 40 years or so. Those in the industry for just a few short years might well marvel at these changes and wonder how the “old timers” ever got anything done!

Ask yourself how many of these early practices you’ve used, or are even familiar with:

1. When you had to send a package of questionnaires or reports overnight, you had to take it down to the local Greyhound or Trailways bus station. Even worse was having to pick up a package at the bus station, over the cries of the shipping managers at the station, who always seemed to say the package was not there!

2. Correcting reports using correction fluid such as Liquid Paper.

3. Paying female focus group participants $5 and male participants $10.

4. Charging $900 for a full-service focus group including incentives.

5. Charging $2,500 for a sample of 300 completed awareness, trial and attitude phone surveys.

6. Having one toll-free number for the state your business is in and a different one for the other 49 states.

7. Calling the phone company to move phones, because they were all hard-wired into the wall.

8. Zap Mail, a failed billion-dollar-plus experiment using centrally located fax machines.

9. Doing focus in living rooms with a reel-to-reel tape recorder.

10. Using punch cards for data entry.

11. Buying a calculator from one of the first manufacturers of calculators, the Singer Sewing Machine Company - and paying $600 or more for it.

12. Actually taking a job to interview one chief of police in a small southern town and being paid $2.50 for the interview.

13. Not being able to afford a WATS line because each line cost $2,400 per month regardless of the number of hours you used. Each phone had to have a separate WATS line.

14.Considering whether or not to buy office machines from Exxon called Qyp, Qwip and Qyx.

15.Manually calculating statistics such as standard error and standard deviation.

16. If you sent out 20 personal letters, they all had to be individually typed.

17. Marveling at the new Xerox Star system of connected “typewriters,” the forerunner of PCs and Microsoft.

18. Bragging that your new computer system had 256K memory, less than a watch has today but more than was used in the first Apollo moon flight.

19. Saying “It’s in the mail,” rather than “My system crashed.”

20. And when the response rate on phone surveys was at least 60 percent on every survey!

We don’t pine for the “good old days” - they are gone forever. But to those who are passionate about marketing research, the fun and excitement of working first as a detective to determine the facts and then as a lawyer to present them, is still there. Long live marketing research!