Gerald Zaltman and Christine Moorman the Importance of Personal Trust in the Use of Research

Primary support for this research was provided by the Joseph M. Katz Graduate School of Business, University of Pittsburgh. Additional assistance was provided by the Shell Oil Corporation and the General Motors Corporation. We particularly want to thank Meera Buck of Shell Oil and Vincent Barabba and Michael Kusnic of General Motors and 170 other managers and researchers who contributed important ideas. Recent and ongoing advances in the way marketplace information is collected and made available provide managers and other research users with unprecedented amounts and kinds of information. Moreover, essentially the same information is available to competing firms at about the same time. As a consequence, competitive advantage is to be found increasingly in what is done with information, i.e., how it is used or employed rather than in who does or does not have it. It is not surprising, then, that more and more attention is being given to factors affecting whether and how information is used (Barabba, 1987; Deshpande and Zaitman, 1982, 1984, 1987; Krum, Rav, and Keiser, 1988). From these efforts, insights have begun to emerge concerning how the use of research is affected by such factors as organizational structure, unexpected results, the political acceptability and actionability of findings, data quality, where in the decision process information becomes available, environmental change, product or service maturity, whether the intent of research is developmental or confirmatory, and the frequency and timing of researchermanager interactions.