In an article in the April 1978 issue of the Journal
of Marketing, Jacoby placed much of the blame for
the poor quality of some of the marketing literature
on the measures marketers use to assess their variables
of interest (p. 91):
More stupefying than the sheer number of our measures
is the ease with which they are proposed and the
uncritical manner in which they are accepted. In point
of fact, most of our measures are only measures because
someone says that they are, not because they have
been shown to satisfy standard measurement criteria
(validity, reliability, and sensitivity). Stated somewhat
differently, most of our measures are no more sophisticated
than first asserting that the number of pebbles
a person can count in a ten-minute period is a measure
of that person's intelligence; next, conducting a study
and finding that people who can count many pebbles
in ten minutes also tend to eat more; and, finally,
concluding from this: people with high intelligence tend
to eat more.