Word: researchers
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...Changes. GM began customer research during the teapot tempest over freewheeling. Every executive in the industry had positive ideas on the subject; Buck Weaver, then on Alfred P. Sloan's personal public relations staff, wondered what the public thought. On his own he sent a questionnaire to a few hundred automobile owners. Some 60% voted for freewheeling. Then a few months later a second questionnaire showed that only 50% wanted it on their cars. GM abandoned freewheeling. It still took Weaver some time to persuade the company that a regular customer research department was warranted. Allowed...
...week, for example, many a New Yorker got free tickets to the Manhattan show on the condition that he fill in a style ballot. Weaver will also muster some of his motor enthusiasts for a personally conducted tour of the show. This week, too. Weaver's biggest customer research opus makes its debut-a slick, 80-page Motorist's Handbook and Buyer's Guide to be distributed to 5,000,000 customers to tell them what they have told GM about their taste in automobiles...
Propaganda. The Motorist's Handbook demonstrates that GM's customer research is not merely a fact-finding project. It is also a highly polished sales and propaganda device. And there is no question that the selling aspects of Weaver's activities are fully as valuable to GM as the research findings...
...this, Buck Weaver stoutly maintains, does not impair the scientific value of his findings. Some other market research experts disagree: and though they give him credit for doing more to popularize market research than anyone else, they declare that he could find out just as much without as much fuss...
Weaver's own answer to such criticism is that his type of customer research must not be regarded merely as a functional activity, but as an operating philosophy which pervades every GM activity. He likes to regard himself as a symbol of a growing trend in Big Business to consider every corporate action, no matter how trivial, from the point of view of how it affects the public. Under this theory public relations becomes an integral part of any manufacturing function, even research. GM baldly admits this: though Henry Weaver's boss is Richard H. Grant, vice president...