Marketing research as a discipline was born in the advertising agencies of the 1950s, as an aid to the account planning function. Over time the marketing research departments in ad agencies got spun off as marketing research companies (IMRB of India was born in HTA, for instance). Then manufacturers realised the need for marketing research and set up their own marketing research departments to interpret the research data that was flowing from the marketing research agencies. Vikram Sarabhai set up ORG (Operations Research Group) to do pharmaceutical retail audit, to help his pharmaceutical company. One of the many pioneering things
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