Qualitative Research in Intelligence and Marketing: The New Strategic Convergence

(Hardback)

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Although competitive intelligence and contemporary marketing research evolved from different intellectual traditions, both are indebted to qualitative methods of research and analysis. Walle shows that by merging their strategies in relevant ways, both fields grow even more robust and responsive to the needs of business clients and decision makers. Written by a noted humanist/social scientist with a wide ranging background in competitive intelligence and marketing research, this book can be viewed as a breakthrough. It is the first book to juxtapose, compare, and integrate the qualitative methods of marketing research with those of competitive intelligence. Among its many important features is a discussion of how to conduct a qualitative audit that assesses the degree to which an organization is able to take full advantage of qualitative analytic techniques. Walle reminds us that the qualitative social sciences and humanities have a strong tradition within intelligence, one that dates back to World War II. Although innovations from the qualitative social sciences and humanities were developed 50 years ago, they were allowed to atrophy as the principle researchers of the time re-entered civilian life. Walle updates and revives them, and shows readers how to do it themselves for their own business purposes. The book reintroduces the World War II-era culture at a distance method that applied qualitative social sciences and humanities to intelligence, but updates them in terms of advances that have taken place since then. It also provides useful means to merge competitive intelligence and contemporary marketing research in ways that will result in collaboration and mutual understanding. Finally, Walle provides an appendix that discusses how to recruit and motivate researchers, whose training comes out of the humanities but whose contributions to business will prove of exceptional value. This is an important new resource for marketing practitioners and graduate level students and their teachers.

Reviews

The book is a scholarly treatment of an interesting topic that contributes to an on-going dialog on the value of the "artistic researcher" in an increasingly high-tech CI milieu.-Journal of Consumer Marketing
This volume remains true to its title in presenting a thorough discussion....This text would be interesting to educators of business strategy course or executives who needed to justify the use of qualitative research approaches.-Journal of Natrition Education
"The book is a scholarly treatment of an interesting topic that contributes to an on-going dialog on the value of the "artistic researcher" in an increasingly high-tech CI milieu."-Journal of Consumer Marketing
"This volume remains true to its title in presenting a thorough discussion....This text would be interesting to educators of business strategy course or executives who needed to justify the use of qualitative research approaches."-Journal of Natrition Education

Author Bio

ALF H. WALLE III is currently a professor at the Jones School of Business, SUNY Geneseo, and has moved between college-level teaching (business, anthropology, English, tourism) and consulting in business and marketing./e He has also worked for the Smithsonian Institution. Among his significant contributions to his fields has been the development of ways to merge the qualitative social sciences and humanities with marketing theory and practice. This is the first of three books that Dr. Walle plans for Quorum, all of which will explore the relationship between marketing and the social sciences.