The world economic crisis has had fundamental repercussions on marketing and qualitative studies. The need for exactitude and the increased culture of economic actors have resulted, to certain extent, in the breakdown of the barrier which existed between universities and marketing. We have seen the arrival of micro-computing and at the same time, the changing of conceptions from dynamic to cybernetic notions; all of this has led researchers to consider communication as being made up for the message which has been transmitted and of its feedback (and no longer as the exchanges of measurable influxes at the receiver level). This has, of course, had a strong influence on traditional means of investigation and analysis.

The triangular interview is one of the techniques used to collect information which takes into account the respective statuses of the interviewer and the interviewee according to a strictly determined narrative protocol. Rather than trying to eliminate the constraints created by the circumstances, modern qualitative studies aim at exploiting and clarifying these constraints.

The computerised analysis of language gives a dearer picture of the reality of textual or verbal discourses. The degrees of intelligibility, of originality or of banality of a text with respect to a discourse can be materialised, even with ordinary micro-computers. One of the major consequences of this ''refining'' of methodologies and of the necessity for very active research ended the concept of one man who assumed the whole study like a ''one man brand''. The research agency is becoming more and more a place of encounter for pluridisciplinary teams of researchers. It is the interface between these study teams and the necessity for objectivity in marketing, the methodological exactitude of which remains undissociable from concrete results.