International Journal of Market Research

Standard correspondence analysis plots are readily misinterpreted by research users. This paper presents a new plot, called the moon plot, which is less susceptible to misinterpretation. Row points are plotted in the traditional way. Column points are plotted equidistant from the origin, with their directions from the origin as in traditional correspondence analysis plots, and the information traditionally communicated by the distance of the points to the origin instead communicated by the size of the fonts of the labels.

The Net Promoter Score (NPS) and the American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI) are metrics used to predict sales, profit and share price change. We identify problems with the design of both the NPS and the ACSI. In particular, we find that the NPS does not measure negative word of mouth effectively, and we argue that the ACSI is similarly insensitive to dissatisfaction. This is because ex-customers and never-customers are not sampled in these metrics, and these are the people who express most of the negative sentiments about brands/companies. We propose a method of measuring the effect of word of mouth using the volume and mean impact on purchase probability of both the positive and the negative word of mouth expressed by users of the category.

UK universities are having to come to terms with the double whammy of a 2010 Spending Review that will see budgets reduced from £7.1 billion to £4.2 billion by 2014, and the Browne Review of higher education funding and student finance, which argues that those who benefit (i.e. students) should make a far greater contribution to the cost than is currently required. Against this backdrop the authors seek to contribute to the graduate skills debate. They will demonstrate that delivering employment-ready graduates ignores the demands of a radically altered world of work in the face of the government's response to the latest economic crisis. While its primary focus is on the supply side (graduates) the authors are cognisant of the market research industry, which itself is facing external pressures to shift from a milieu of data gathering to a future of intelligent insight providers. We then go on to present the development of a new type of university, which has actively sought to reduce its dependency on traditional funding sources. Finally, we present a model of a research facility at one university that has successfully engaged with the local and regional business community to the benefit of its student workforce. In doing so, it has helped to develop over 70 graduate researchers, with entrepreneurial mindsets, who have all gone on to secure enterprising futures.

The majority of online research is now conducted via discontinuous online access panels, which promise high response rates, sampling control, access to populations that are hard to reach, and detailed information about respondents. To sustain a critical mass of respondents, overcome panel attrition and recruit new panel members, marketers must understand how they can predict and explain what motivates people to participate repeatedly in online surveys. Using the newly developed survey participation inventory (SPI) measure, we identify three clusters of participants, characterised as voicing assistants, reward seekers and intrinsics. Our results suggest that most online surveys are filled out by intrinsically motivated respondents that show higher participation rates, response effort and performance; incentives do not offer an important response motive.

Market segmentation is a widely accepted concept in marketing research and planning. Although cluster analysis has been extensively applied to segment markets in the last 50 years, the ways in which the results were obtained have often been reported to be less than satisfactory by both practitioners (Yankelovich & Meer 2006) and academics (Dolnièar 2003). In order to provide guidance to those undertaking market segmentation, this study discusses the critical issues involved when using cluster analysis to segment markets, makes suggestions for best practices and potential improvements, and presents an empirical survey that seeks to provide an up-to-date assessment of cluster analysis application in market segmentation within a six-stage framework. Analyses of more than 200 journal articles published since 2000, in which cluster analysis was empirically used in a marketing research setting, indicate that many critical issues are still ignored rather than addressed adequately.

While new product evaluation testing plays a pivotal role in the NPD process, there is little empirical evidence on the influence of the virtual testing environment on the evaluation results and the data quality. The present study addresses this gap in the literature by using a split-sample online concept testinglike study to compare the testing results in traditional and virtual environments five heterogeneous innovations. The findings indicate that both traditional and virtual testing environments yield identical mean scores, while the latter provides higher-quality data given the same sampling design. Early concept or product tests, therefore, may be carried out in a more realistic testing environment using virtual techniques, which could substantially enhance the quality of testing data.