International Journal of Market Research

As an agency-trained researcher, the two years I spent as Head of Research at a mental health charity opened my eyes to the fact that mental health problems are ‘invisible’ and widespread, and that people with mental health problems regularly face exclusion. During this time I conducted many research projects among people with mental health problems, usually about mental health-related issues and services, through which I responded to feedback and constantly amended my approach to ensure that I was providing a high-quality and inclusive research environment. My attention was also drawn to the fact that many people with mental health problems are also consumers of mainstream products and services, and therefore form a notable proportion of the population of participants involved with mainstream research projects. In this article I will discuss ‘best practice’ ways in which mental health problems should be considered when conducting mainstream qualitative research projects, and focus groups in particular.

This paper reports the findings from an in-depth, exploratory research project designed to understand how consumers create, use and behave in response to content on consumer review websites. Based on data from members of a consumer review site, it seeks to capture the experiences and behaviours of consumers, and to convey their voice as users of social media and other digital sources. Consumers, who are part of Generation C, constitute a significant proportion of the membership on consumer review websites. In this paper, the nature of this generational category is discussed and situated within their use of social media. Reflecting calls in this journal for an innovative and open research agenda, the methodology is designed to reveal new forms of informational behaviour among this group of consumers, who are at the forefront of social media adoption. The research reveals that activities within consumer review sites are embedded in broader social media behaviours, and that this influences the creation and use of consumer-generated and marketing content. The identification of such new forms of consumer activity forms the basis for further research and the incorporation of Generation C into successful marketing strategies.

Marketing theory and practice evolved dramatically through a series of transformations from products to services and, recently, customer experiences. Each stage has its own perspective on marketing's purpose, the nature of customer value, and measurements that calibrate performance and guide managerial decisions. The latter is of particular interest to market researchers. Measurement (research) typically lags behind changes in marketing theory due to institutional factors and the time it takes for new practices to diffuse. The authors posit that firms still measure customer experience against criteria more suited to evaluating product and service marketing. Research practice seems rooted in 1990s notions of service quality, itself an outgrowth of total quality management (TQM) originating in manufacturing during the 1980s. The authors argue that market researchers will serve their organisations and customers better if they take an active role in updating the customer experience measurement commensurate with advances in the conceptualisation of that which firms offer customers.

Having more solely loyal customers (those who only use one supplier) is an aspiration for most service providers. Yet, it is unclear whether, or in what way, solely loyal customers differ from customers whose loyalty is divided between more than one service provider. One loyalty indicator is a consumer's evaluation of the quality of service they receive. Using seven sets of cross-sectional data, this research reveals that solely loyal customers give, on average, approximately 10% more positive service quality evaluations than customers of the same provider who also use other providers. The implication of this finding for market researchers and practitioners is that service quality scores could be moderated by the distribution of solely loyal and multiple-provider users in a given sample. Therefore, every service quality survey should measure how many providers a customer uses and control for the proportion of solely loyal customers when tracking change using cross-sectional samples.

This research attempts to investigate the determinants of a sports team sponsor's brand equity and whether the proposed structural relationships vary across countries. Field data are collected from sports team fans in two Asian economies/countries, i.e. Taiwan and Indonesia. According to the findings, in general, team identification and perceived congruence between the sponsor and the sponsored sports team affect the sponsor's credibility, which in turn has an impact on the sponsor's brand equity. ‘Country’ moderates the above structural relationships. However, the effects of team identification and perceived congruence on the sponsor's credibility do not receive supportive evidence in Taiwan and Indonesia respectively.

Conjoint Analysis (CA) is a technique heavily used by industry in support of product development, pricing and positioning, and market share predictions. This generic term CA encompasses a variety of experimental protocols and estimation models (e.g. rating-based or choice-based), as well as several probabilistic models for predicting market share. As for the rating conjoint, existing probabilistic models from the literature cannot be considered as reliable because they suffer from the Independence of Irrelevant Alternatives (IIA) property, in addition to depending on an arbitrary rating scale selected by the experimenter. In this article, after a brief overview of CA and of models used for market share predictions, we propose a new model for market share predictions, RFC-BOLSE, which avoids the IIA problem, yields convergent results for different rating scales, and outputs predictions that match regression reliability. The model is described in details and simulations and a case study on truck tyres will illustrate the reliability of RFC-BOLSE.