International Journal of Market Research

Forecasts of household vehicle consumption are important for automobile market analyses. This paper employs the ProFamy extended cohort-component new method to project household vehicle consumption from 2000 to 2025 across four regions of the United States (the Northeast, Midwest, South and West). The results show that the total number of household vehicles in 2025 will reach 235 million, representing a 31% increase over the 25 years. About a half of the increase is due to the consumption of cars, while the household consumption of vans will increase at a faster rate than that of cars and trucks. Household vehicle consumption will grow more in white non-Hispanic and Hispanic households in comparison with black non-Hispanic and Asian and other non-Hispanic households. Owners of household vehicles in the United States will be ageing quickly. Among households of different sizes, the largest increase in household vehicles will come from two-person households. Across the four regions, the largest increase in household vehicle consumption will be in the South, followed by the West, Midwest and Northeast.

The recent census in the UK, taken in March 2011, may also have been our last - since the Office for National Statistics has announced that it intends to explore alternative more cost-effective options for ‘census taking’ in the future. In this paper, we consider what the options may be, based on approaches and experiences from other countries, and assess their implications for users. We start by reminding ourselves about the value of the census and the strengths and weaknesses of the current approach. We then identify the principal methods being followed in other countries, together with their advantages and disadvantages. This leads us to review methodological work in the UK, building up to the current ‘Beyond 2011’ ONS project. We focus on administrative records as a possible way of removing the need for a full population survey. Finally, we assess the options and discuss the implications for users in market research.

This paper introduces a new method of studying consumer phenomena by combining two different semiotic philosophies. Using cosmetics as the vehicle to demonstrate the technique, this study explores the semiotics of visible face makeup in Australian Caucasian women. It aims to understand why women wear makeup and how they experience the signs of make-up and appearance in everyday life. The study comprises two phases. The initial phase adopts a communication model extended from Saussurean semiotics, while the second employs a triadic semiotic philosophy as proposed by Charles Sanders Peirce. Results indicate that, by combining the two semiotic perspectives within one study, the researcher is able to gain greater insights about the consumption behaviours of individuals from a communication as well as an experiential perspective. For marketers, this greater understanding of how the consumer interacts and experiences brands and products allows for more strategic and focused communication with their target market. In addition, this approach provides useful information about symbolic consumption, so trends and new directions in cultural paradigms can also be predicted. An example of this is shown in Figure 2.

In mixed-mode surveys, it is difficult to separate sample selection differences from mode-effects that can occur when respondents respond in different interview settings. This paper provides a framework for separating mode effects from selection effects by matching very similar respondents from different survey modes using propensity score matching. The answer patterns of the matched respondents are subsequently compared. We show that matching can explain differences in nonresponse and coverage in two Internet samples. When we repeat this procedure for a telephone and Internet sample however, differences persist between the samples after matching. This indicates the occurrence of mode effects in telephone and Internet surveys. Mode effects can be problematic; hence we conclude with a discussion of designs that can be used to explicitly study mode effects.

A widely used technique in internet surveys is ‘forced answering’, which requires respondents to enter an ‘appropriate’ response before they are allowed to proceed to the next survey question. Forced answering virtually eliminates sources of respondent error due to item non-response. However, using forced answering might cause respondents to opt out entirely or break off early in the survey, which would increase non-response error. It has been suggested that one way around this is to provide a ‘prefer not to answer’ (PNA) option if forced answering is used, which would allow respondents to continue without providing a response to each question. This study examines effects on item non-response rates of using forced answering and ‘prefer not to answer’ in internet surveys. Findings reveal that use of PNA is not a perfect substitute for leaving questions blank, which brings into question the equivalency of response options that allow internet survey respondents to bypass answering questions and quality versus quantity tradeoffs associated with internet survey design choices.

Qualitative international research is increasingly popular in marketing, management and business practice. Cultural dimensions, most importantly language, play a central role in this research context. The importance of language in the context of questionnaire design and international data gathering has long been stressed in various sources (Pike 1966; Brislin 1970; Piekkari & Welch 2004). However, the practice of qualitative data collection and analysis has not been addressed sufficiently, although new and innovative software-based tools are available to help these efforts. This paper deals with methodological and practical issues in analysing qualitative interviews with corporate elites. We illustrate conceptual challenges in setting up qualitative projects that build on interviewing corporate elites and address practical implementation issues in terms of multilingual coding, node creation and theory building by means of computerassisted qualitative data analysis software (CAQDAS). To this end a specific empirical example will be used.