Machiavelli, humanistic empiricism and marketing research

Machiavelli is often dismissed as an amoral (or even immoral) advocate of a “dog‐eat‐dog” world. In reality, his contribution is much more complicated than that. Machiavelli, above all else, was a humanistic empiricist who, instead of making unwarranted assumptions about human behavior, applied the empirical method combined with a humanistic vision in order to analyze people and their actions on their own terms. By doing so, he advocated a method of analysis that, in recent decades, has emerged as a vital technique of marketing research. By keeping Machiavelli’s contribution in mind, marketing researchers can most effectively perform empirical analysis that, while being objective, recognizes the distinctiveness of human beings and their behavior.