Ray Kent
Part-time Lecturer
Background
I began my academic life as a sociologist, first at a teacher training college in Leeds and then at the University of Stirling in 1970. In 1984 I transferred to marketing after gaining an MSc in marketing at the University of Strathclyde . I have always been interested in methods of research, both in sociology and marketing and have several publications in this area. See my short cv. In 1995 I became Director of the MSc Marketing until I took formal retirement from the University in 2006. I am now a part-time Lecturer and in my wizened years am increasingly of the view that while many researchers spend a lot of time and energy collecting data, their analysis just goes through what have become standard routines, often with limited or disappointing results. Several other alternatives should be considered, for example configurational and fuzzy-set analysis, Bayesian statistics, neural network analysis, chaos theory and some data mining techniques. Bringing these to the attention of researchers has become something of a passion.Research Interests
Research Group: Consumption, Markets and Cultures.
Ray has published on topics as diverse as product range policy, marketing communications with sensitive groups, measuring media audiences, marketing research methods, private trading on the internet, improving email responses from customer databases and using fuzzy-set analysis as an alternative to traditional frequentist approaches.
Selected Publications
Kent, R. and Brandal, H.
Improving email response in a permission marketing context, International Journal of Market Research, 45.4, pp 489-503, 2003.
Kent, R.
Cases as configurations: using combinatorial and fuzzy logic to analyse marketing data, International Journal of Market Research, 47.2, pp 205-228, 2005.
Kent, R. and Argouslidis, P.
Shaping Business Decisions Using Fuzzy-Set Analysis: Service Elimination Decisions, Journal of Marketing Management, 21.5, pp 641-658, 2005.
Kent, R.
Marketing Research. Approaches, Methods and Applications in Europe, Thomson Learning, 2007.
Kent, R.
Rethinking Data Analysis – part one: the limitations of frequentist approaches, International Journal of Market Research, 51.1, pp 51-69, 2009.
Kent, R.
Rethinking Data Analysis – part two: some alternatives to frequentist approaches, International Journal of Market Research, 51.2, pp 181-202, 2009.
