Every marketing decision rests on a belief about the customer. Marketing intelligence is the discipline of finding out which of those beliefs are actually true.

This book works through the research process in the order a practitioner actually follows it: framing the question a decision depends on, choosing between data that already exists and data that must be collected fresh, and applying the right method — qualitative, survey, experiment, conjoint analysis, or perceptual mapping — to the question at hand.

It closes with the two disciplines most research efforts skip: building a program that accumulates knowledge over time, and actually turning a finding into a decision.