Marketing Research
A Technical and Academic Treatment
Preface
This book is a technical and academic treatment of marketing research. It is written for two readers at once: the doctoral researcher, who wants formal constructs, derivations, identification assumptions, and citations to the primary literature; and the senior technical practitioner, who wants the intuition, the trade-offs, and runnable code. Wherever the two pull in different directions, the book leads with intuition and follows immediately with the formalism, so that neither reader is short-changed.
Three commitments shape every chapter. First, rigor: constructs are defined formally, methods are stated with their estimators and assumptions, and empirical claims are tied to the primary literature in the top marketing journals. Second, reproducibility: quantitative ideas are accompanied by code that runs. Third, verifiability: every cited work carries a DOI, so any claim can be traced to its source.
The book is organized into parts that move from what marketing studies (constructs and substantive domains) to how it studies them (methodology), and then to the advanced seminars and research craft that define the modern field. A short history of marketing thought (see 2 A Short History of Marketing Thought) situates the whole enterprise before the substantive material begins.
No formal prerequisites are required, though a reader comfortable with introductory probability, regression, and a scripting language such as R will get the most from the methodological chapters.