Learning from giants: Exploring, classifying and analysing existing knowledge on market research

The paper presented here is an abridged and adapted version of an article by Pierre Berthon, Agnes Nairn and Arthur Money which appeared in Marketing Education Review, 13, 2 (Summer) 2003. The objective of the paper in IJMR now is to encourage practitioners and academics alike to build their own research on the foundations which have already been built by previous thinkers. We hope to demonstrate that a good literature review goes well beyond a cursory acknowledgment of the other authors who have worked in the area and we present the 'paradigm funnel' as a tool which can be used to this end. We demonstrate how it can be used to go beyond simply listing a series of past studies to move towards the production of a structured analysis of a total body of research which can generate enlightened research thinking. In this paper, the paradigm funnel is used to structure a historic body of research on Market Segmentation. Since the publication of the original paper the paradigm funnel has also been used to analyse Brand Management literature in an award winning thesis by Heding and Knudtzen (2006). These authors have added the notion of 'paradigmatic turbulence' to the original funnel and have applied it to a 20-year period of time.