Relationships Between Providers and Users of
Market Research: The Role of Personal Trust

Summary

As information technologies improve, research data relevant to a broad spectrum of marketing decisions is becoming available to more firms and as described in this artilce, more groups within firms. Sustainable competitive advantage will depend less on having information but more on effectively using information and more effectively having information used by more in the organisation. Research has shown that two sets of factors strongly influence how market research information is applied to decision making: the size of the organisation and the interactions between data providers (researchers) and manager.

While organisational size limits the ability for unfiltered, actionable information to pass along the line, this article concentrates on reviewing works on the interactions between researchers and managers provided by Zaltman and Moorman (1988) who uncovered the single most significant factor affecting such interactions: personal trust.

Findings

Research users' trust in their market research providers reduces the uncertainty associated with using market information in increasingly complex competitive environments. Moreover, management decisions are only as good as the knowledge on which they are based. A strong, trusting relationship between research users and providers can help ensure that the knowledge underlying marketing decisions will be valid and reliable.

Despite the importance of trust, there has been little study of (a) the factors that most strongly enhance the building and maintenance of a trusting relationship between researchers and users, (b) the role of trust in enhancing the use of market research information, and (c) how trust affects the interactions between market research users and providers. By sampling market research users in major firms, they identified five sets of factors affecting trust:

1. characteristics of the user
2. interpersonal characteristics of the researcher
3. characteristics of the user organisation
4. interdepartmental characteristics
5. and characteristics of the market research project.

Study results showed that the most important factor enhancing the users' trust in researchers is the integrity of the researcher. Four other personal characteristics of researchers enhanced trust:

1. confidentiality
2. sincerity
3. tactfulness
4. timeliness

Two characteristics of researchers' abilities also affected trust: their expertise and their willingness to reduce uncertainty. It was discovered that the characteristics of the user firm and the characteristics of the research project appeared to be less critical.

Importantly it was learned that trust strongly but indirectly affects the use of market research. That is, its the quality of the interaction that drives the use of research information.

From the users' perspective, the quality of the interaction depends on:

• how well researchers handle disagreements with users
• how insightful they are about research findings
• how much strategic understanding of the users' business they display
• how customer-oriented they appear to be
• how productive they make their interactions with users.
   

Implications for Researchers

The findings raise a number of questions that can help users and providers build and maintain stronger working relationships.

• Identify areas to reduce uncertainty (in process, costs, outcomes by expanding user knowledge)
• Understanding the cues that increase user confidence (e.g. researcher talks from business context)

Their work offers researchers insights into the importance of different factors on trust, research professionals, such as AFS and many of the readers of this article will need to acknowledge that trust in relationships develops over time (up or down from a starting level) and where they can play a role in presenting or influencing factors that develop greater trust, at the outset of a project, throughout and into later stages of a project.
 

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