Know your customer: Client captivation and the epistemics of market research

Introduction

Market research requires both making knowledge and maintaining client relationships. Research material needs to be useful and maintain connections with the receiving actors who ultimately determine its value. This article inquires into a group of market researchers, focusing on how they handle these multiple, possibly conflicting aspects of making reports, presentations, consumer knowledge and so on. Using the ethnographic case of a market research firm in Sweden, I show how despite conflicting definitions by clients, market researchers have ways of framing the work to inform their clients as an integrated and straightforward issue. Further, the ethnographic approach helps in uncovering the interconnectedness and tensions between market research knowledge and the processes and relationships of its production. Market researchers must know their customers because client relationships pervade their work.

Definitions of market research typically stress the importance of the subsequent use of results. Industry organization ESOMAR ¹ defines market research as ‘the systematic gathering and interpretation of information about individuals or organisations using the statistical and analytical methods and techniques of the applied social sciences to gain insight or support decision making’ (ESOMAR, 2007: 5). Marketing scholars Sofie Bjerrisgaard and Dannie Kjellgaard see market research as ‘practices of knowledge production that establish versions of market reality and consumer subjectivity to be used within organizations’ (Bjerrisgaard and Kjeldgaard, 2013: 32). The issue of why research is commissioned is relatively open and whether market research strives to describe or prepare for action is contextually shifting (Díaz Ruiz, 2014; Nilsson and Helgesson, 2015). Ultimately, however, clients and their use of results have centre stage in definitions of what market research is.

While market research is basically characterized as producing research material for the benefit of use, the nature of receiving parties and what role they play in market research is more complicated. ESOMAR defines the client as ‘any individual or organisation that requests, commissions or subscribes to all or any part of a market research project’ (ESOMAR, 2007: 5). Exactly how such a shifting client entity receives or uses material is not straightforward and raises the issue of how the research effort must include considerations of the client relationship. It is not necessarily the same to strive towards use, insight or customer satisfaction with research results – especially when the receiving party may be a person or an entire organization. With research being a product to be bought and sold based on its value for client use, it is important to better understand what role the client and client reception have in the making of commissioned research.

This article inquires into how the client features in commissioned knowledge production. The guiding research question is: How do market researchers consider and attempt to shape how clients receive commissioned market research knowledge? Clients are both customers to whom projects are sold and actors to be informed based on research results, and their preferences play a dual role. The article showcases the value of studying marketing agencies and employing ethnographic studies in marketing. I focus here on how research is related to clients, through speculation and determining their features, as well as actively shaping them throughout the research process. Of particular interest is how researchers determine who their clients are and how to cater to the client–researcher relationship.

The market researchers at Swedish firm Norna (pseudonym) were studied ethnographically. Particularly, my investigation focused on how they conceive of and seek to affect the clients who are to benefit from the research reports. I present the subsequent material by outlining the stages of a research project, starting from how market researchers talk in their weekly meetings about ‘helping the client’. With local understanding of research work, I am drawing on ethnographies of knowledge practices (Hackley, 2000; Knorr Cetina, 1999; Traweek, 1988). I also employ analytical tools used for the study of capture, involving sociological and anthropological theorizing about how subjects are caught, won over or captivated. Franck Cochoy has studied how reception by consumers is shaped in terms of ‘captation’: the shaping of subjects’ dispositions through particular arrangements (‘dispositifs’). He has also noted how such captation efforts extend to winning over marketing professionals themselves (Cochoy, 2007, 2011, 2015). To further the notion of captation, I draw a parallel with how Alfred Gell (1996) has described art appreciation and his comparison of captivating works of art with traps. Here, I extend the metaphors of capture to thinking about how commissioned knowledge production requires strengthening client relationships in tandem with producing knowledge.

Market research materials are produced with the purpose of being useful, when both industry actors and marketing scholars characterize market research (Deshpande and Zaltman, 1982; Moorman et al., 1993). However, this criterion is often beyond observation for the market researchers themselves. Market research features goals of informing decisions, earning a profit doing research or the ambition to achieve an advisory or consultative role (Nilsson and Helgesson, 2015). While most of these goals involve shaping situations beyond a research project, researchers are typically removed from much of their clients’ reception and even further from clients’ decision-making. It means that researchers are prompted to find their own solutions to the ambiguities of commissioned knowledge production, and such work features local epistemic theorizing on these issues.

Understanding knowledge making

Rather than focusing on the knowledge content that market researchers produce, this article explores the production of research results in this specific setting. Marketing knowledge is in itself a relatively open-ended term: There are working definitions (Jones, 2002; Rossiter, 2001), but the meaning of such concepts varies across industry and academic settings (Cornelissen, 2002). Market research produces knowledge as representations of markets, consumers and so on to enable managers to act within their business environment (Díaz Ruiz and Holmlund, 2017; Nilsson and Helgesson, 2015). It bears mentioning that other decision makers, and their ability to act within their respective environments, can constitute the goal of market research work too: for example, non-governmental organizations or government bodies may commission market research firms to produce knowledge about the public (c.f. Lezaun and Soneryd, 2007). Centrally, market research purports to describe people, things and situations in a manner that allows for acting in relation to them.

While market representations may not correlate with the world, declarations of the state of things constitute a crucial part of marketing knowledge formulation (Díaz Ruiz and Holmlund, 2017; Rossiter, 2001). There are several epistemological positions on the nature of knowledge, ranging from realist ideas of correspondence between representation and reality, to pragmatic focus on usefulness of representations, to constructivist and performative notions of knowledge as something shaped, and in turn shaping (Bjerrisgaard and Kjeldgaard, 2013; Callon, 1998; Sismondo, 2011). The ability to act on resulting knowledge has been noted to be more central to managers than the ‘truth value’ of reports: compelling material that conveys a sense of order satisfies the condition of preparing a decision maker for action: ‘marketing knowledge can be both successful in its declarative aspect […] and simultaneously useless for specific firms’ (Díaz Ruiz and Holmlund, 2017: 3). Marketing knowledge is descriptive as well as actionable.

Representations do not need to be ‘true’ for them to be considered knowledge and what comes to count as knowledge or an insight is specific to particular settings (c.f. Ariztia, 2015; Nilsson and Helgesson, 2015). Marketing knowledge in the making is an emergent phenomenon, which may be fruitfully studied without committing to rigid a priori definitions (c.f. Rappert, 2001). What comes to be considered knowledge is then the outcome of particular situations, ideas and practices. This study of knowledge production takes its cue from Karin Knorr Cetina’s ethnographic study of epistemic cultures: focusing on the mechanisms for producing knowledge (Knorr Cetina, 1999). Often based on studies of scientific institutions, such accounts (e.g. Knorr Cetina, 1999; Traweek, 1988) have parallels in research into actors who produce knowledge for more explicit marketing purposes, such as advertising planners (Hackley, 2000). More generally, the study of how ideas about markets affect research outcomes (Araujo, 2007) ranges from auto-ethnographic accounts of doing market research (Heiskanen, 2005; Sunderland and Denny, 2011) and exploration of researchers’ materials (Díaz Ruiz, 2013, 2014), to inquiry into how subjects are rendered (Dussauge et al., 2015). These studies show how underlying assumptions and organization of working towards knowledge will affect the results.

Understanding the production of marketing knowledge requires attention directed at the relationships between producers and recipients of results. It means focusing attention on how market research materials are produced in a relational context. Examples focusing on production include how consumer researchers make sure they have the same ideas about the client as about its targeted consumers (Grandclément and Gaglio, 2011); the making of commissioned knowledge in financial and industry analysis (Knorr Cetina, 2010; Pollock and Williams, 2015); or advertising planners trying out tentative results with clients (Jacobi et al., 2015). Further, the uptake of research material within buying organizations has been approached as an outcome of how market intelligence is sold by researchers and other involved parties (Kohli and Jaworski, 1990). Producing insights relies on making connections between the dispositions of the receiving party and the features that apply to them (Ariztia, 2015). Reception of competing portrayals of consumers and audiences is affected by devices, such as figures (e.g. matrices and tables), and strategic simplification of results (Jacobi et al., 2015; Pollock and Williams, 2015). Features and dispositions of the receiving actor are matters of concern in the making of knowledge about markets.

For a knowledge artefact, such as a report to instruct and inform, it must be made to suit its user. In his outline of advertising agencies, Tomas Ariztia (2015) notes that in producing consumer insights, an insight is considered to be a fundamental truth that constitutes a specific opening for an opportunity to act, and as such insights are contingent on the specificities of the environment where they happen. Producing an insight relies on going ‘beyond’ facts to find a link between consumers’ dispositions and the features of offerings and products, which presents an opportunity for action (Ariztia, 2015). Descriptions of products and consumers are shaped by the actors involved in order to arrive at productive understanding. This article inquires further into how clients and research results are considered and shaped in tandem throughout the making of market research materials.

Shaping materials for their recipients

A way to approach how receiving parties are considered and targeted is provided by Cochoy’s work on how marketing devices are marketed (2015). Studying how self-service interiors for supermarkets were sold to grocers on the promise of improving consumer sales, Cochoy notes that both these actor categories are targeted using similar means:

[T]he most manipulated actors are not always the obvious ones; professionals are often manipulated by those who sell manipulation tools to them. (Cochoy, 2015: 138)

The notion of captation suggests that the means to influence a receiving party are shaped by ideas about the target’s dispositions. For example, Cochoy’s (2015) inquiry features customers to whom supermarket equipment is sold because they are interested in selling more to shoppers. This means that marketers of this equipment must cater their offering (dispositif) to the dispositions of one type of customer, as well as assume the dispositions of another set of customers: the shoppers, in the offering. This ambiguity of dispositions and dispositifs lends well to considering how products and consumers are shaped in relation to each other (Woolgar, 1997). Work to make products features both efforts to determine the needs of the user and shaping product and user to suit each other. Both captation and the notion of ‘configuring the user’ (Woolgar, 1997) point to how actors such as researchers, managers, engineers and so on characterize their work in relation to clients, customers or users, and how producing things for them relies on anticipating and shaping the dispositions of the receiving parties.

Another way to think of manipulating one’s intended target is by drawing on metaphors from other captivating artefacts. Gell (1996) has suggested the usefulness of the trap as a concept for understanding art. Gell points to how art is a matter of captivation and uses the trap as a metaphor to show how artefacts are modelling those that they are aimed at capturing. Like a work of art, a trap is a device for provoking certain behaviour from targeted agents, and the design of a trap is an expression of how the targets of the trap are characterized. Objects of capture may be explored through meanings that they convey about those that they are to catch. Gell argues that the trap can be read like a text, telling how the hunters model their prey:

[W]e are able to see that each is not only a model of its creator, a subsidiary self in the form of an automaton, but each is a model of its victim […] Or the trap may, more subtly and abstractly, represent parameters of the animal’s natural behaviour, which are subverted in order to entrap it. (Gell, 1996: 27)

Assumptions about how the animal perceives and navigates its surroundings, what Gell (1996) refers to as the animal prey’s Umwelt, may be similarly used to devise situations where animals themselves provide the work of getting captured. Similarly, works of art have ‘functions which are “practical” in terms of local conceptions of how the world is and how humans may intervene in its workings to their best advantage’ (Gell, 1996: 36). The ‘partial connection’ (Gell, 1996: 36) between traps and art may be extended for examining marketing materials. For example, a net may be an actual tool for trapping animals designed according to their shape and movements; it may be displayed as an artwork drawing in its viewer by its conceptual strength; or it may be used as a metaphor (e.g. ‘network’) in a marketing pitch. In all these cases, assumptions of how a target perceives and interprets the world may be utilized to elicit a particular response and lure the ‘prey’ in.

This article uses a series of tools to study commissioned knowledge production. Previous research has pointed to the openness of knowledge concepts, while ethnographic approaches to knowledge making pave the way for analysis of the mechanisms through which research produces knowledge. Studies of research about consumers, markets and so on note the importance of the relationships between researchers and clients in shaping the knowledge produced. Concepts, such as captation and configuring the user, inform this inquiry into how research is shaped by receiving clients: product offerings and receiving clients are ambiguously shaped in accordance with each other. Finally, motifs of manipulation and capture as part of knowledge making benefit from comparison with traps and other ways in which artefacts are shaped to model those they seek to affect. Rather than assuming that relationship management, marketing and so on are separate from the commissioned production of knowledge, this article instead seeks to understand how client relationships and ideas about receiving parties are fundamentally intertwined.

Methodology

I have undertaken ethnographic research at Norna (the name I use as a pseudonym for the market research branch of an international marketing group). The particular department at Norna that I studied – Consumption & Technology (C&T) – consists of around 20 employees who sell, plan, undertake and report market research projects for commissioning clients. The department is doing mostly ‘custom research’. This means one-off projects designed to a client’s specification using survey techniques such as focus groups and interviews. Quantitative work such as customer or consumer surveys is planned and analysed by C&T, but survey scripting, interviewing and collecting happen in other branches of the company. Clients who are targeted and served by C&T are mostly in consumer-oriented areas such as fast-moving consumer goods (FMCGs) and services, including consumer banking.

I followed the work from September 2013 to May 2014, using interviews and participant observation. Twenty-eight interviews were conducted with the unit’s co-workers holding different positions from project managers and assistants to account managers and department heads. These interviews covered the informants’ backgrounds, what they do at Norna and their ideas about market research work. Of these, 27 were digitally recorded and then transcribed. For practical reasons, one interview had to be documented using only notes.

Participant observation was undertaken in the spring of 2014 at the company office in Stockholm. I took part in day-to-day work in the Norna offices and in research projects, assisting with running work such as interviewing, serving product samples, taking notes during meetings and proofreading reports. My involvement ranged from active participation in five projects and interviewing the staff involved and collecting materials and documents in three additional projects. I focused observation around how my informants engaged with producing knowledge, what their routines were, how they regarded their objects or knowledge and how it was made in relation to clients. This ethnographic approach allowed for looking not only at how my informants spoke about work and clients but also provided the opportunity to learn about how characterization of market research work, client relationships and so on played out in practice.

Direct contact with clients tended to happen away from the Norna office, before the researchers knew whether my participation in the project would be possible. Therefore, I rarely had the opportunity to observe initial sales meetings. Similarly, the eventual project presentations were not immediately available to me, as my informants wanted to avoid disrupting their clients. Further, in some cases, reports were simply handed over without an in-person presentation. In light of this, I interviewed informants before they delivered presentations to gain knowledge about how projects had ended. I also conducted post-presentation debriefing interviews for two of the research projects. Resulting materials consist of a diary of situations such as department and project meetings, training sessions, consumer research activities including interviews as well as focus groups, and company presentations.

I analysed the transcribed material starting with the first cycle of in vivo coding, paying attention to processes, activities and situations (Saldaña, 2012). Prior to coding, making field notes is in itself an interpretive endeavour where the researcher’s perspective shapes the production of research material (Davies, 2012). Topics such as ambiguities, client relationships, discussion of what would constitute good research projects, sales as well as characterization of clients were noted as part of the coding effort. I did this while also looking for themes complementing the way in which other marketing scholars have described such knowledge production. Topics of interest were the ambiguity of market research work as knowledge making, how the selling of products and services was handled and the relative openness of what constitutes clients. This search for local ways of making sense of market research is an attempt to look for local interpretation, and conducting ‘epistemography’: the study of particular ways of handling knowledge (Lynch, 2013). Informants have had the opportunity to take part in the transcriptions of their respective interviews, and I have presented results at C&T in order to maintain communication over my interpretations.

The findings are presented with Norna’s work cycle as an ordering principle. This constructed chronology is a representation of the work sequence at Norna, and it conveys how considerations of client relationships pervade the work. I present this ethnographic ‘bricolage’ (Lévi-Strauss, 1966) to show how observations from several projects and situations fit together holistically. Starting from the weekly Monday meetings and the explicit discussion of clients and projects that goes on there, I will discuss concerns over client captivation and knowledge making as they are voiced during the production stages of a research project. Presenting material in this fashion demonstrates how market researchers are involved with clients throughout the research period, from sales efforts to actually delivering the results of the commissioned research effort to the client. The researchers who figure in this article are referred to using aliases that indicate their role within Norna: Account managers’ names begin with A (i.e. Aaron, Adam, Aida, Alice, Anders and Axel), experts in qualitative methods have names beginning with an E (i.e. Emma and Eric) and project managers’ monikers begin with P (i.e. Philippa and Pia).

Working with clients at Norna

Projects at C&T are structured both by the demands of research (e.g. planning, undertaking fieldwork, analysing and presenting results) and by the work to sell projects (e.g. networking, maintaining contact with old clients and approaching new prospective clients). A distribution of labour separates these spheres of work in which project managers are responsible for projects running smoothly and account managers are responsible for client contacts and sales. However, in the day-to-day work, both these aspects of research work are regularly considered in tandem. The following section will discuss how market researchers at Norna plan their projects together with their clients, how they produce materials through fieldwork and analysis with their clients in mind and how they prepare and reflect on the presentation of results. It shows how commissioning clients feature throughout the research process. I will begin this foray into the situation where work with clients is summarized and discussed on a departmental level – the weekly Monday meeting.

Gauging and dealing with clients during project setup

C&T works with setting up projects in a manner that largely resembles textbook descriptions of market research (Kotler et al., 2016). Projects are prepared over meetings with clients. The meetings are held to determine details such as how research goals are met by research questions, research design and respondent selection, and how survey questions or interview guides are to be written. This stage sees regular contact between account managers and project managers of Norna on the one hand and the representatives of clients on the other. Such setups, my informants note, may give rise to conflicts over how to frame clients and their interests. Project manager Philippa noted the possible conflict of how to handle clients in running a project:

I reckon you have to go with the person with the mandate to buy the research, and listen to them. And then I mean you keep looking for approval: ‘shall we do it this way? Is that ok?’ and then, I mean, then you ask the client and it is a person and if he or she wants to pass the question on, it’s up to them. But I mean one can’t communicate with ‘the company’ as such. That’s the way I think.

This tension is regarded as a potential conflict of interest by account manager Anders. In the following interview quote, he comments on situations where market researchers may perform ‘tracking’, meaning the ongoing collection of figures for a client over long stretches of time. Such projects offer relatively secure repeat business and stability, both on the part of the market researchers and their clients. I asked Anders about whether he thought that the relationship with individual client representatives within a company could blur the line of who Norna’s client is, and where loyalties should be placed. He responded:

Yes, that is a tough one […] Mostly it happens with ongoing systems that keep rolling forward. Then they can become a platform for the person’s legitimacy in some way. And then the question becomes ‘who is our client?’ Who are you the most loyal to? Is it to this person or to the company? It’s a hell of a balancing act. Good question! I have no good answer.

Conflicts of interest may arise between the client representative that is Norna’s point of contact, and the organization at large. Such situations may call for siding with the individual, as Philippa suggests, but it may pose a risk too, as Anders points out. The challenges posed by the notion of helping frames the client differently from just being a monolithic entity and it requires Norna co-workers to speculate and make judgement calls as part of their work.

With market research being tasked to inform business decisions, Norna researchers try to deal with the fact that many of their clients are in fact not decision makers. My informants frame this by differentiating between ‘the clients’ as either merely a representative or as the ‘end client’. Several such framings provided by Norna co-workers gravitate towards classifying clients in ways that resemble the formal notion of the buying centre: a ‘group of individuals brought together for the purpose of making a purchasing decision’ (Solomon, 2013: 204). Stressing difference of interest between actors, the concept offers a way to discuss how different roles are involved in an organization’s purchases. This is especially pressing if the person Norna researchers are dealing with is a designated specialist such as an insight or marketing manager. Adam, one of the account managers notes this:

With some clients we have contact with some sort of insight manager or market research executive. They have limited responsibilities: to secure research results. Like an internal link. But that is not the person who will work with the information. It’s different if you work with those who disseminate it within their organization, or their markets […] If we are dealing with the end client we have a better chance of selling more consultation based services. Otherwise this internal person – client – wants to take the job themselves. [S/he acts as a] sort of a gatekeeper: ‘Give me the information. You get to come in and present, but running this internally is my role’.

Here Adam imagines the client representative to be an intermediary, not the actual ‘end client’ who will use the results, and thus not the target for more consultation-oriented research: such intermediaries cannot be helped in their business decisions in the manner of the ESOMAR characterizations of market research cited in the introduction. Adam’s quote is an example of how certain types of categories of buyers present problems for Norna’s researchers. They may lack the ability to make decisions or harbour preferences that restrict room for manoeuvre on the part of Norna’s researchers.

At times, I wondered what to make of consultation in light of the sort of characterization that arose when I asked project managers about their research-oriented work. An explanation offered to me by Adam looked like this: Adam:

I mean, traditionally researchers – at least a few years ago – were information suppliers. Then someone else with the client, or the client and a consultant, have taken the material and worked further on it. As far as it is possible we try to take it along a few steps […] I think we’ve realised that the data supply business is not sustainable any more, plus this makes work more fun.

Nilsson:

Sure, I can understand that, but I was wondering if this is driven by client demand?

Adam:

No I think it is a move on our part […] Our role as consultants is based on the research – I like to talk about research-based consultation. Because that is our strength. Us bringing facts. Then, it’s good that we may help our clients interpret those facts and help them use them, too.

The focus on providing consultation services tells us something about how market researchers wish to sell: The market researchers at Norna mean that their work revolves around helping clients by providing them with presentation and reports. These reports are to be used by decision makers, who are attractive targets for repeat business. Researchers in the company see market research materials as ideally part of advising clients in their decision-making. As this is not always possible because of the sort of client representatives they work with, researchers try to resist thinking about themselves as simply providers of information. Instead they want to produce value by giving advice in the form of consultation services, which may be even more specifically catered to the client.

During the work to identify research aims, Norna employees sometimes do workshops with their clients. Ostensibly, it is a way to make sure that the client organization and the researchers are in agreement about the project, working out research questions that suit the researchers, the client representatives as well as other members of the client organization. ² Through workshops, researchers get to know what their clients are like, and what they want, beyond what they can glean from contacts with the individual client representative or representatives. It is also a way for the researchers to embed analytical concepts within the client organization. Workshops are an example of how to make sure the client has the right tools to appreciate eventual results: effectively an attempt to shape reception.

A recurring way of ensuring that clients receive project results well is what my informants call ‘anchoring’. The phrase, as it is used at Norna, has to do with establishing shared analytical frames and terminology to complement the analytical direction of the report. If previous accounts (e.g. Deshpande and Zaltman, 1982; Moorman et al., 1993) have noted how shared frameworks are a factor in clients’ trust in market research, the common ground established appears in this case as an outcome of deliberately shaping effort. Norna’s view of the client’s situation and the solutions they offer may be cultivated in advance of the report itself. For instance, project manager Pia uses the term when she explains the use of workshops as part of presenting results: Nilsson:

So it’s not just that you meet but that you connect the study to more of the client’s people?

Pia:

Yes. Anchor it, kind of. That’s why Anders does workshops as early as when putting together the interview guide, to anchor the study from the get-go, with the people it is supposed to land with.

According to Pia, Anders does workshops not only because he needs input to the research questions, but because it makes clients more receptive to the results, through increased familiarity with the concepts that direct the study. It suggests how work to get recipients thinking about results in a particular way includes the analytical frameworks that imply and complement a certain understanding of the findings, rather than simply presenting results hoping that they are received well. Understanding is co-opted as part of this knowledge making.

As I discuss the use of anchoring through workshops, Anders brings up one of his business-to-business models that he likes to use in workshops with clients. It is a matrix for thinking about client relationships, distinguishing between client contacts on a personal and on an organizational level. The way he described using it in workshops, Anders’s model for how his clients should think about customer engagement is in itself a way for Anders to engage with clients. Anders draws a grid (see Figure 1) on the whiteboard in the meeting room and explains it:

If you imagine a matrix, with people as one column and organisations as the other […] And you have three levels of engagement for each column. Basal functional level, one level that is added value, and one that is about emotions. What we do then is that we have a framework for our business-to-business studies, if you can think of a score to each square here.

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 1.

Anders’s matrix.

The model describes not only the analytical framework Anders recommends his clients to take with their customers, it also expresses and shapes the relationships of market research. Anders’s use of it during workshops establishes analytical common ground with his client representatives, presenting an opportunity to improve the client’s ‘level of engagement’. Just as he advises his clients, there is risk involved in maintaining relationships when only dealing with individual client representatives. ‘That’s a risk profile if the co-worker quits the company; if you don’t have a strong connection to the company brand and identity’. Use of this model describes how to do good business-to-business but also strengthens bonds with the client and Norna as shared conceptual frames are established. Anders notes:

A way in which we anchor in an organisation is to fill the matrix with content that is unique to the client. We then start with a workshop with the whiteboard. There we typically work with post-it notes and try to fill each box with relevant things and you work up a shared picture of ‘what is it that we generate for our clients?’ and you can do those workshops with basically any group of staff in a company. It’s an excellent way to anchor things and establish a shared view.

Anders’s model works to make recipients draw conclusions in line with the analysis that he and Norna will propose. Anders gives the following answer as I suggest that one of the things done in anchoring work is tightening relationships between researcher and client:

Yes. A way that I think is pretty good is to get a critical mass of people within the company to accept a concept. That reduces your reliance on people, so I reckon that’s a tactic to use.

Discussion

The article has studied how a group of market researchers produce knowledge in relation to clients. Attention to Norna further develops this inquiry into how ideas about customers and consumers affect commissioned knowledge making (see Figure 2). There are similarities between ESOMAR characterization and work at Norna: Market research is the systematic production of marketing knowledge. At Norna, however, ideas about the nature of results and clients’ role in receiving and using results are subject to rich speculation and action. Importantly, the range of activities to sell, undertake and land projects with clients at Norna is summarized by discussions about ‘helping’. Such help appears to seamlessly cover both the task of informing clients and the goal of improving their propensity for action (Díaz Ruiz and Holmlund, 2017; Nilsson and Helgesson, 2015), be it in the capacity of making business decisions or furthering particular arguments. In order to achieve this, the research project at Norna is catered for the client from its inception to presentation. The distinction between market research as a task to find things out in a realist fashion (Kotler et al., 2016) or as a production of certain knowledge objects (Bjerrisgaard and Kjeldgaard, 2013; Heiskanen, 2005) is not definitive when considering how findings may be downplayed, or put forward in presentations.

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 2.

Characterizations of market research from ESOMAR and Norna.

As the Norna case also shows, the importance of material to be received well prompts consideration and shaping of clients. The notion of captation helps thinking about how to consider Norna’s credo of ‘helping’. Such help calls for producing and presenting results in a manner that suits the client. This is noted by my Norna informants in their interest of being more than information providers as well as in ESOMAR textbooks (Nilsson and Helgesson, 2015). To phrase it in the language of captation, the production of results tailored to the clients is the matching of dispositifs to dispositions. Further, the notion of configuring the user (Woolgar, 1997) is good to ‘think with’ (Douglas and Isherwood, 1996): There is an open-endedness to how dispositions and dispositifs are shaped to ensure a ‘good fit’. A match between disposition and dispositif can be achieved by shaping the product as well as by shaping the receiving actor. This is evident in how research questions and materials are shaped in workshops. Not only do workshops ensure that the project pursues questions that are relevant to the client organization: they also pave the way for reception of results through dissemination of the researchers’ interpretive framework. Matching the dispositions of clients with dispositifs of the report or presentation works as a parallel to the matching of user and technology as a mutual alignment where the change of agents and their relationships are equivocal.

The complicated client make-up that hides beneath the singular moniker ‘the client’ calls for an analytical approach that nuances clients and their dispositions. Attention to what it is to ‘help’ or to make ‘the client a hero’ is useful here. Research is not only about producing knowledge to aid decision-making within a firm: There are many reasons for commissioning research and the persons that Norna work with and have to please often have their own individual needs, motives and motivations. The Norna case with its open-ended clients and client dispositions challenges the relatively straightforward notion of dispositions stipulated by captation (Cochoy, 2007, 2011, 2015) or construction of marketing knowledge in relation to clients (Ariztia, 2015; Grandclément and Gaglio, 2011; Sunderland and Denny, 2011). A ‘client’ that is ambiguously singular or composite prompts attention not only to just who this client of commissioned market research is, but also to where and when. The strategies used to ensure a good project outcome sometimes mitigate, sometimes put to use the fact that there may be conflicts of interest.

With the ambiguous and fragmented instances of ‘client’ at Norna, there is need for an analytical approach that helps embrace the nuances of client dispositions. The clients that commission knowledge are encountered by Norna researchers both as purchasing organizations and individual representatives and might not always share needs and goals. The strategies employed during projects to handle this openness lend themselves well to Gell’s (1996) art-as-trap metaphor. Gell’s thinking with traps puts focus on how tools of capture model their prey, as well as the prey’s dispositions towards their surroundings. When a target is imagined, so is its Umwelt, be it the lifeworld of an animal, or the company of the client representative. Strategies of taking the client representative’s situation to heart at Norna thus appear in a different light than if client dispositions are assumed to be on the part of an undivided target. With the client organization as the Umwelt of the individual client representative, material may be designed to win a client over by thinking of one instance of ‘client’ in relation to the other. While spoken of as a singular entity, ‘the client’ to be helped can be considered as a set of tension-laden intra-related actors that are both singular and plural.

The use of discourses to help clients is a way to make sense of market research work and the many ambiguities and conflicts that it entails: it is convenient to fall back on the idea that market research can be summed up in helping a seemingly singular client by providing them with knowledge (ESOMAR, 2007). Talk about helping clients traverses and tones down the ambiguities involved in dealing with making reports and making sure they are deemed worthy by clients (Ariztia, 2015) whose interests and dispositions are multifaceted (Cochoy, 2007, 2011, 2015). Clients are subject to distinct speculation when they are to be helped but Norna’s researchers are not content to second guess them. They employ their classification of client types and the distinction of clients as both singular and plural when they attempt to help them. It matters here that the knowledge is for sale. It is also important to understand that the dynamics involved in commissioned knowledge production (Knorr Cetina, 2010; Pollock and Williams, 2015) involve challenges on the part of producers to know the clients to whom material is sold.

To summarize, market research is a generative case for exploring and understanding the production of marketing knowledge and the ideas and practices of market research. Further, employing concepts of captivation in this setting is productive for this inquiry as well as useful to challenge and develop such notions further: The making of marketing knowledge here features the shaping of research to suit the client. This requires rich speculation about who the client is. As shown by the Norna case, it also involves efforts to shape client reception. Whether we base our understanding of market research in the stark realism of ESOMAR’s (2007) definition, or by the constructivist characterization noted by Bjerrisgaard and Kjeldgaard (2013), the Norna case conveys how this poses a challenge for involved market researchers. It prompts recognition of the fact that not only are market researchers trying to find out about consumers and markets, they are also speculating about their clients’ dispositions and even trying to influence them. This hones the use of capture metaphors and the notion of captivation: a problem with knowledge implied in the work towards client reception is that producing commissioned material for the client requires sophistication and judgement calls regarding the nature of clients and their dispositions. Market research work both provides and requires knowledge about customers.

Conclusion

This article shares the task of understanding market research knowledge making with market researchers themselves (c.f. Nilsson and Helgesson, 2015). I have described how market researchers at a Swedish research firm handle the challenge to produce material that is meant to inform marketing action, and the problem of working out notions of how clients shape commissioned material. Producing a fruitful reception of knowledge does not only involve shaping the reported results. The knowledge-making process also features work to shape the receiving party, that is, the client. Marketing knowledge, describing the opportunities for productive matching of dispositions and dispositifs, is produced in a manner in which the clients and their conceptual surroundings are anticipated and shaped as part of the research process. Further study of the connection between marketing knowledge and markets can advance the issue of how particular market relationships are integral to the production of such knowledge.

Approaching marketing practice using ethnography showcases the tensions involved in producing and making sense of marketing knowledge among practitioners. Previous research has stressed the role of researchers producing consumer knowledge and shaping it in relation to clients (e.g. Bjerrisgaard and Kjeldgaard, 2013; Díaz Ruiz and Holmlund 2017; Grandclément and Gaglio, 2011). Inquiry into how clients feature as complex figures, subject to speculation as part of knowledge production develops this line of thought further. In this article, the matching of dispositions and dispositifs has been shown to involve clients as well as consumers, and the call to know your customer applies to researchers who try to shape clients according to ideas about their Umwelt and dispositions. Further study of ambiguities in marketing and knowledge production can deepen our understanding of how deferring to clients themselves gives rise to new questions and speculations.

Market researchers make sense of the conflicts of interest and the openness of what it means to produce knowledge for a commissioning client. We can learn from seeing how these researchers strive towards helping clients through marketing knowledge: They posit an absence of conflict between working to produce informative material and making it deemed worthwhile by a suitably configured client. Good knowledge is helpful because it is inherently actionable. Yet, making knowledge recognized as helpful requires considerable work. This approach is not a theoretical panacea: It is merely a particular answer to the distinction between describing and acting. Further, with reception being the only gauge for the usefulness that market research knowledge is meant to provide, client reception risks becoming an end in itself rather than the usefulness it is meant to indicate. This challenge and how marketing professionals resolve it constitutes a productive area of inquiry where the particularities of producing knowledge cannot be readily separated from, nor be reduced to, the relationships through which it functions.

Ethnographic research into market research is useful for understanding the production of marketing knowledge. Such knowledge is made to inform decisions – a condition that falls beyond the scope of the market researchers producing it. As shown by this inquiry, however, it still shapes knowledge making. Shaping content and client dispositions to improve reception can mitigate the remoteness of the client action which market research is meant to inform. Framing the work with an imperative of helping the client alleviates conflicts between relational and epistemic aspects of commissioned market research. The idea of helpfulness posits an absence of fundamental conflicts between describing and acting on markets, while allowing for discussion of practical challenges of doing market research: be it the client that will not form the right understanding, the client representative’s lack of reach within their organization or even the nosy ethnographer who wants to know what constitutes good research.