The birth of qualitative research

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In the 1920s, advertising agencies introduced and developed market research in the UK. As clients built their teams of research interviewers to support national distribution and sales in stores, advertising agencies ran the marketing function on their behalf, focusing on the end consumer. 

As a result, qualitative research stopped being the sole preserve of academics, therapists and psychotherapy buffs, and started to be run by graduates who had not necessarily studied social sciences. Two agencies were particularly instrumental in starting the planning function – J Walter Thompson and Boase Massimi Pollitt (BMP). Here, planners were expected to use market research to develop and refine advertising strategy.  

Notoriously at BMP, planners held hundreds of their own discussion groups each year; no ad was allowed to run unless it had first been researched. At J Walter Thompson, it was felt to be unprofessional for planners to run their own groups, but they used research to learn about brand personality – discovering, as they did so, that those who had never been interviewed talked about brands as if they were real people, and were able to judge whether an advertising concept was faithful to the personality that brand represented.  

Two women, in particular, were significant: Judie Lannon, who was recruited to run the creative research unit at J Walter Thompson a few months before Stephen King founded the planning department there in 1968; and Creenagh Lodge, who – at Pritchard Wood – pioneered the use of converting scripts into key frames and soundtracks. 

Lodge never worked at Boase Massimi Pollitt, but her model for development research was adopted when she left to start her own company – Craton Lodge and Knight. 

These radical ways of testing advertising allowed creative advertising ideas to get made just as TV commercials were changing to full colour. Clients became confident of approving ads that would otherwise have been turned down because they didn’t look like any advertising that had been made before. 

Once it had been shown that customers understood advertising ideas and could decode the brand messages behind them, British advertising had an advantage that was swiftly exported. Jay Chiat, the US advertising expert, described account planning as “the best new business tool ever” because of the way it brought ordinary people inside the development process.  

And the demand for this kind of research moved beyond the advertising agencies. Qualitative researcher Mary Goodyear might have railed against Wendy Gordon and her start-up the Research Business for ‘industrialising’ qualitative research, but groups were here to stay, and a whole industry grew up to service this new way of supporting marketing. 

Researchers learned to distinguish between advertising ideas and executions – so an execution that failed in research didn’t have to scupper an entire campaign. Likewise, advertising ideas that were mostly right could be tweaked until the underlying creative idea was clear. 

Qualitative research companies used conceptual frameworks influenced by advertising and brand ideas, which allowed quick turnarounds and creative leaps. Quantitative research, somewhat unfairly, was labelled as the ‘what, who and how’, when qualitative became the apex, answering the question: why?

Now that qualitative research has matured – and has had to weather criticism around amateur moderators and professional respondents – it is good to be reminded how research enabled advertising to become a strong cultural force when people genuinely thought the ads were better than the programmes.  

The first planners were data literate, and consumer research was considered fundamental to creating any communications. Now that planning has become a worldwide phenomenon in most communications agencies, there is a danger that the consumer centricity that gave them a job in the first place has been supplanted by the planner/strategist as arch-presenter and post-rationaliser. 

Marketers still need to answer the question ‘why’, and can only do so by asking real people and getting answers that aren’t always popular or expected.