Pragmatic marketing is based on customer insights and testing the product before it goes to market. It uses market segments to identify the most important features that customers want and is similar to agile software development in which the product is constantly being tested and re-adapted to meet the needs of the marketplace.
A key tenet of pragmatism is that it avoids getting involved in the contentious metaphysical concepts such as truth and reality, accepting that there may be single or multiple realities that are open to empirical inquiry (Creswell and Plano Clark 2011). This approach can be applied to research as well, as a pragmatist researcher will only adopt a research methodology if it has the potential to contribute towards answering a specific research question. Researchers’ warranted beliefs about the likely consequences of their choice of research methods are shaped by their previous experiences and shared by the wider research community within which they are members, thus pragmatism is considered to be a dynamic and adaptive research paradigm (Morgan 2014a).
The concept of pragmatic philosophy is rooted in American culture, starting with The Metaphysical Club, a group of Harvard-educated men who met for informal philosophical discussions during the early 1870s. The Club included proto-positivist Chauncey Wright (1830-1875), future Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes (1841-1935), and two then-fledgling philosophers who would become the first self-conscious pragmatists: Charles Sanders Peirce, a logician, mathematician, and scientist; and William James, a psychologist and moralist armed with a medical degree.
Their approach was to abandon a quest for the ultimate political perspective, true social theory, or the best knowledge-generating method and instead start with an ethics-based pursuit of democracy, equality, and justice for all. This ethics-based approach is embodied in the pragmatic maxim, “Whatever works is right.”
Pragmatism is also an ideal research paradigm for patient-oriented and advocacy-based work, as it emphasises the importance of creating practical knowledge that is useful for action for making purposeful change in practice (Goldkuhl 2012). The utilisation of the scientific method of inquiry combined with democratic values make pragmatism a fitting paradigm for this kind of research.
A pragmatist researcher will only engage in research that is relevant to their social context, which requires the detection of a problem in a given situation. This problem can then be tackled by using a combination of appropriate and innovative research techniques to achieve the desired outcome. This is what Dewey referred to as the ‘pragmatic cycle’.
This approach can be applied to research as well as business, such as identifying market problems by interviewing current and recent evaluators of your product and then developing and testing a prototype to address the most important issues identified by these customers. In doing so, you will have all of the information needed to build the most desirable product for the market. This is what pragmatism means when it says, “whatever works is right.” This approach to product development is also reflected in the pragmatic marketing process itself.
