The new Role of Marketing Research Toward Sustainability: A Value-Driven Perspective

The increasingly turbulent environment calls for a new role for marketing research to employ the holistic research approach and shift its focus on abilities to learn key knowledge for creating superior value and sustainability. This paper addresses such holistic views using multiple qualitative methods to obtain wider and deeper knowledge/information from professional experts, academicians and executives of various industries experiencing in marketing areas. The findings support the proposed framework revealing the new marketing research requires three significant changes from the original conception of market research: 1) incorporating experience and active collaboration between researchers and decision makers into research process to set the key knowledge most critical to sustainable advantages; 2) employing multiple research methods most useful and applicable to build capabilities in superior learning key knowledge; and 3) enriching interpretation for insightful understanding and facilitating superior decision and proper action. Further study illustrating a case study of the most successful public company in Thailand retail trade industry gives more insights on how to apply holistic perspective. Following the new research approach, the company employs seven forces focusing on periodical study of consumers and employees, improved information technology and data management, and continually building good relationship and strong collaboration with all stakeholders. These assist in developing core capabilities and dynamic capabilities to faster identify key knowledge, better learning for in-depth understanding and proper decision on an effective implementation of superior holistic value creation of stakeholders. The company's net profits margin, return on equity (ROE) and return on investment (ROI) outperformed the industry average during the year of 2004-2009 and expected to continue in 2010-2012. These evidences confirm the well applied holistic orientation able to sustainable competitiveness and long-term business success.