ABSTRACT
This chapter develops hypotheses and scenarios about the evolution of marketing research.
It considers the impact on marketing research of the appearance and development of new digital data sources and of the rise and rapid rise to market dominance of new companies that create and then exploit this data.
It investigates the role of academic research versus that of grey literature and how the relative roles of these two ways of publishing research may change.
It also considers how digital developments may affect decisions about whether to use primary or secondary research approaches.
It investigates the rise of the discipline of customer or consumer insight and how this affects the world of marketing research.
We then consider how these developments might change what clients need and how marketing researchers might respond to their new and ever-changing needs, using several scenarios whose characteristics and probabilities are discussed.
