Editor's note: Paul A. Scipione is the author of A Nation of Numbers, a consumer psychologist  and former professor of marketing at Montclair State University. 

In May, Quirk’s published Lisa Featherstone’s article, “The Birth of the Focus Group: Lazarsfeld, Merton and the Nazis.” We all know the old adage success having many fathers. Both Paul Lazarsfeld and Robert Merton do have legitimate claims on focus groups. But there is another equally legitimate claimant – Ernest Dichter.

I knew Dichter during his last decade but my contact with Lazarsfeld and Merton was limited to occasional conversations while I attended Lazarsfeld’s Applied Social Science Seminar. I was thrilled when I first attended as the guest of my lifelong mentor, Herbert Abelson, who co-founded Response Analysis Corporation in 1969. 

Lazarsfeld, Merton and Dichter were contemporaries. In my history of commercial marketing research, A Nation of Numbers, I labeled the 1940s through the 1960s as the golden age of MR, a period that also included other marketing research giants such as Alfred Politz, Daniel Starch, Arthur C. Nielsen Sr. and John B. Watson. 

Lazarsfeld and Dichter were both born in Vienna and died less than 50 miles apart – Lazarsfeld in Newark and Dichter in Peekskill. You could argue that at least 90 percent of the worldwide development of MR took place along the less than 100-mile drive between New York, Princeton, N.J. and Philadelphia.

Lazarsfeld and Merton were renowned quantitative researchers, with doctorates in sociology. Dichter’s doctorate was in clinical psychology (including psychoanalysis). Like the majority of first-generation market researchers, the three gravitated or fell into marketing research rather than formally studying it. There really was no organized MR profession before World War II and Starch was arguably the only one who offered formal academic courses in MR and advertising research (at Harvard Business School) during the first 25 years of the 20th Century.

Rather than recommending that researchers directly confront consumers with “why” questions, Lazarsfeld, Merton and Dichter favored more subtle approaches to studying consumer behavior, primarily via one-on-one (in-depth) interviews and qualitative discussion (focus) groups, where consumer similarities and differences, as well as “why” answers, could be discovered via free association and projective techniques. Dichter in particular believed that structured, pre-coded quantitative surveys forced consumers to respond, even when their actual motivations were not explored. 

The first focus groups

It is probably futile to try to identify one research pioneer as the first to hold focus groups with consumers, though there is evidence that Dichter might have held a slight lead. I find it significant that Dichter was the only one of the three with formal training in clinical psychology and was using psychological research techniques in Europe before emigrating to the U.S. in 1940. Data granularity is also a factor. Lazersfeld and Merton specialized in studying large populations, while Dichter favored studying individual consumers and families. All three researchers were Jewish and fled to the U.S. to escape the Nazis. So did Politz, though he was not Jewish. Other first generation MR pioneers including Watson, George Gallup, Starch and Nielsen were American-born.

Gratitude

Today’s generation of marketing researchers should be grateful that Lazersfeld, Merton and Dichter gravitated toward qualitative research. Dichter preached that qualitative should be used as a stand-alone tool, while Lazeresfeld and Merton believed that focus groups and in-depth interviews should be used as a prelude to larger, usually more definitive quantitative studies. But all three came to a consensus that quantitative MR is better at finding out what and where consumers buy, while qualitative MR is usually better at ferreting out why. And all three were serious academics who wanted to apply their theories and research techniques in the real world.