EMAC Distinguished Marketing Scholar 2012: Respect the data!

Consumer research suffers from a lack of respect for data. Researchers routinely fail to report full experiments that do not produce expected results and often eliminate alleged “outliers” on the basis of inappropriate rules, leading to biased test reports. Scholars appear to be relying less on non-experimental data, even as the serious limitations of experimental data may create structural discrepancies with the other, non-experimental cases of a phenomenon or process, such that it becomes impossible to study some major consumer phenomena. The lessons from empirical data get accepted only when they can be described as confirming preexisting conceptual frameworks. This article presents an extensive analysis of multiple forms of a lack of respect for the data and proposes some remedies. Overall, data should never play a subordinate part.