As a result, firms outsource some of this activity across consulting firms, marketing research firms, and analytical firms and then are challenged to implement it.

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Wharton FOA began the project about five months ago and has so far garnered 175 responses from advertisers, agencies, media companies, marketing research firms and academics.

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There are also plenty of other ways to develop a company's scientific and selling skills: research agreements, licensing arrangements and marketing alliances between drug companies, biotechnology firms and other bodies are all less traumatic than forcing two different corporate cultures into one bed.

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"It's definitely a problem, but when brokerages are banned from using research for marketing, there isn't much incentive for them to cover smaller firms, " says Louis Thompson, chief executive of the National Investor Relations Institute.

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As marketing costs in the new era of financial supermarkets have ballooned, research and due diligence expenditures at many brokerage firms have not kept up with that spending, points out A. Michael Lipper, whose firm, Lipper Analytical Securities, follows the brokerage industry.

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