Harry Henry

Harry Henry (11 March 1916 – 22 November 2008) was one of Britain's market research pioneers whose contributions to its acceptance and understanding won him an international reputation.

Harry Henry was born in London on 11 March 1916, as the elder son of an accountant, who died in 1924.

His mother brought up and provided for her two sons by working as a dressmaker.

He attended two primary schools, one in Finchley and the other in Hackney and at the age of eleven was transferred to Upton House London County Council Central School, in Homerton.

He was eventually posted to the headquarters staff of Montgomery's 21st Army Group, where he played a modest part in the preparations for the invasion of Europe and in subsequent operations in France, Belgium and Germany.

During the latter part of this period, he found the opportunity to use his market research skills in surveys of radio listening among the troops in that theatre of war, and was also responsible for the introduction of a number of what would later be referred to as Information Systems.

One of these involved the production of a weekly abstract of administrative statistics for circulation throughout the theatre, and another, the devising and operating of 'TOCCI' (Theatre Officers Central Card Index), a system making use of Hollerith punched-card equipment to facilitate and speed up the demobilisation of officers.

He obtained the London Matriculation with Honours, and was awarded a Wedgewood Scholarship to City of London College in 1932.

In 1934, he was awarded a Bursary that enabled him to enter the London School of Economics (LSE), where he read Economics, with Statistics as a subsidiary subject.

In those days, the LSE had less than 3,000 students.

Henry served as senior treasurer of the Students' Union, editor of the Clare Market Review, the union's official magazine (after having edited and largely written Felix, an extremely unofficial one), Chairman of the Social Committee, Chairman of the Literary Society, Business Manager of the Review of Economic Studies (an academic journal), and Vice-Chairman of the Labour Society.

Towards the end of this, he was involved in a libel action arising from an article he wrote in the University of London Union Magazine, pointing out that the gerrymandering involved in the election of the M.P. for London University gave control to the commercial correspondence colleges, whose interests were commercial rather than academic.

Pressure from the judge (in chambers) led to a reluctant withdrawal, but there were no damages and he was convinced that Higher Authority had organised a cover-up.

He obtained a B.Sc. (economics) in 1937, which qualified him for his first job.

Colman Prentis & Varley, a relatively new and extremely small advertising agency, having gained two minor advertising accounts from Procter & Gamble (just beginning to make a presence felt in the UK, under the name of Thomas Hedley) learnt that it would need a market research department.

They went to LSE to find somebody to fill this role, in the mistaken belief that what was required was a statistician.

He married Mary Anstey, daughter of Vera Anstey, in 1938.

Henry was appointed to this post in 1938, and began to learn about market research, largely by experiment.

He supplemented this as the London correspondent of The Boston Globe, providing a weekly column on the various social and other activities of the family of Joseph Kennedy, the then US ambassador to London.

The outbreak of WWII terminated these apprenticeships, and he was called up in 1940.

After training in the ranks of the Royal Artillery, he was commissioned in 1941, and served as a regimental officer in various anti-aircraft batteries until 1943, when he transferred to the newly formed statistical branch of the Army as a Staff Officer.

Henry was demobilised with the rank of major in 1946.

He returned to Colman Prentis & Varley, which had begun to move into the big league, first as market research manager and shortly thereafter as director and general manager of Market Information Services Ltd, a subsidiary company that he created from scratch.

He was one of the 23 people who, in 1946, founded the Market Research Society, and played a major role both in the development of research techniques and in the promotion of market research as a tool of management.

He was the last survivor of the 23 founders of the Market Research Society (MRS), which he helped establish in 1947, and which now has 8,000 members in 50 countries.

His particular interest in the media of communication was stimulated by the fact that he was responsible for the planning, conduct and production from 1947 to 1953 of the Hulton Readership Surveys, which were the predecessors of what became the National Readership Surveys.

He was also Editor and joint author of The Rural Market (1948) and Patterns of British Life (1950).

In this same area, he was responsible for the Hulton Tables of Advertisement Attention Value (1949), the development of the first system for using punched-card equipment to compute net press coverage (1949), and the first national surveys of readership among farmers (1947), among retailers (1948) and among children (1950).

By the time he left Market Information Services in 1954, it had grown into one of the top ten research companies in the country.

These years were a period of rapid expansion in the field of market research as a whole, and he took his part in the development of many of the procedures which subsequently came into common use.

In 1954, he joined McCann-Erickson Advertising Ltd. as Director of Research, and there built up a very sizeable research department, more closely integrated with the overall workings of the agency than was usual in those days.

In particular, it became agency policy to persuade clients (particularly new clients) that full-scale research into their markets would result in more effective advertising.

In 1959, he launched Marplan Ltd., a subsidiary company, which developed along these lines into what was one of the leading market research agencies in Great Britain.

He organised the establishment of sister Marplan companies in Belgium, France and Germany, and was Chairman of the McCann-Erickson European Research Committee, while continuing as a senior member of the board of McCann-Erickson Ltd.

In 1988, he received the Market Research Society's rarely awarded Gold Medal.

She died in 1989, a year after they had celebrated their golden wedding anniversary.

In publishing, he was marketing director of the Thomson Organisation for nine years, where he also became a deputy managing director.

His influence was significant in pulling an old-fashioned conservative industry towards the appreciation and practice of marketing in newspapers and magazines, a benefit inherited by radio and television.

He was the first to use the computer in a market research study.

In 2004, he received the Advertising Association's prestigious Mackintosh Medal, awarded for outstanding personal and public service to the industry (in this case, only the third time in the previous fifteen years, and also in recognition of forty years as chairman of its Advertising Statistics Committee).