A Master Class in Brand Planning: The Timeless Works of Stephen King

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You Can’t Make Sense of Facts until you’ve Had an Idea

By Kevin McLean, Co-founder, Wardle McLean

 

 

 

 

 

I met Stephen King once at a Christmas party a long time ago. I remember someone tall, head held slightly back, an amused expression. He seemed rather shy, very intelligent but very nice, in a slightly mischievous way. Maybe it was those glasses, part Oxford don, part Ronnie Barker.

Stephen King presented the article at the Market Research Society Conference in 1983 and asked: What kind of research should we be celebrating, 30 years on from the incorporation of the MRS? Should we be doing action-oriented research, or should we do research that stimulates innovation? This extraordinary article should be read by anyone who thinks about marketing or research, as it has probably become more and more relevant over the last decade or so.

 

A Surprising Conclusion

The extraordinary thing is the radical conclusion. In a paper entitled “Applying research to decision making”, he concludes that applying research directly to decision making is not only wrong but has probably had economically disastrous consequences for the UK! Whoops. Research should be about ideas, understanding and innovation, not about measurements or trade-off analysis. We should educate ourselves, experiment and then evangelize. We should use good research within differently structured organizations to stimulate innovation and generate economic value.

He argues so engagingly in order to soften the effect of the bombshell. ...