A Word From The Director

To Market or Not To Market?

The past two issues of The Research Exchange (Vol. 5, No. 1 and 2) have focused on major concepts of market research literature and practice. These issues have attempted to paint parallels between the work of NIDRR grantees and the role that marketing plays in the customer-driven real world. In addition, they have described strategies to extend current grant activities to include market research data gathering to assist you in more effective outreach planning and implementation.

In our current Information Age, the time is past to consider if the "fruits" of our publicly-funded labors should be marketed to those groups that are the targeted and intended beneficiaries of our efforts. It is the case that we must be concerned with how well our dissemination strategies are reaching those audiences. Time is past when one can argue that "one size fits all" when it comes to how we conduct, package, and make our information available to very different target audiences. In other words, there is an expectation that our information—often, our major project outcome—will produce benefits. While those benefits may be displayed in many ways for a variety of potential target audiences, there is still an expectation that our research outcomes will reach and be able to benefit those who could be positively affected.

Even if unplanned, marketing principles affect your dissemination and utilization outcomes. If you develop written materials, recipients will compare and appraise their impressions of attractiveness, user-friendliness, and the extent to which they are "drawn into" the information. If, for example, your project has developed and maintains a Web site, it is not possible for viewers to ignore their impressions of the Web site's graphic and text components, the ease of navigating the site, the nature and value of the information you have to share, and their enthusiasm to return.

Marketing techniques provide valuable tools that can help all of us improve our dissemination and utilization outcomes. Marketing is quickly becoming an essential component of an effective and impactful project effort. The application of marketing research techniques and related marketing concepts can be considered to be on a continuum ranging from high to low. Your project's dissemination and related marketing efforts are somewhere on that continuum.

This issue of The Research Exchange highlights some examples from actual NIDRR grantee experience, that can be found on the "marketing continuum." Each grantee has demonstrated ways in which selected marketing principles mentioned in the past two issues of The Research Exchange can and are being used within their project's dissemination activities. We want to thank to all those grantees who worked with us in creating this issue.

John D. Westbrook, Ph.D.
Director, NCDDR

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