International Journal of Market Research

Marketing researchers are interested in the consumption-related knowledge, attitudes and behaviours of children. As a result, children often constitute the target population for marketing-related research, participating in focus groups and interviews and completing questionnaires. However, what are children's attitudes towards participating in such research? This paper presents the results of a series of focus groups conducted to address this question. Findings suggest that, overall, children (5–12 years of age) enjoy participating in research. Children over the age of 6 were also found to have a good understanding of why marketers conduct research and hold a positive attitude towards the use of information obtained. Children were found to prefer research activities that are short and visually appealing, that enable them to express their opinions and are not completed independently.

Opinion polls are the currency of politics. They are used by media organisations to evaluate the performance of governments, and by governments and political parties to test the policies that shape manifestos and reform agendas. But opinion polls all rely on one thing - asking people how they themselves intend to vote - and, too often, classical opinion research techniques fail to confront the issues that underpin inaccuracy. In the UK and in many other countries around the world, their performance over the past 20 years has ranged from excellent to disastrous.1 The ‘Wisdom of Crowds’ concept turns conventional predictions on their head. It assumes that any crowd that conforms to a core set of principles is capable of delivering a more accurate prediction than the smartest people within it. This paper tests this proposition within the context of actual elections in the UK, showing that the Wisdom of Crowds approach used by ICM Research at the 2010 general election would have produced the most accurate final pre-election prediction. It also shows that a Wisdom approach to regular vote intention tracking produces an interesting complement to classically conducted vote intention polls. Or, if one were to be bold, a competitor to them.

It is an implicit tenet of qualitative market research that it is possible to find out what the consumer ‘really thinks’. Our research language reflects this - we talk about ‘depth’, ‘probing’ and ‘getting under the surface’ of otherwise superficial consumer responses. This underlying assumption has a questionable intellectual pedigree, however. As qualitative researchers, we should, in contrast, be more concerned with understanding the processes and structures that determine how consumers think. If we understand these processes and structures we will be more able to identify how brands are constructed by consumers and how the meanings of brands are created.

Traditional ethnography focuses on identifiable cultural groupings of individuals and, through a process of observation and participant interviews (among other techniques), the researcher explores the effects of the social dynamic with regard to a topic of interest. Webethnography (also known as netnography, webnography, online ethnography and virtual ethnography) involves the application of ethnographic research methods to specific online communities through the observation and analysis of online dialogue and other online artefacts. This paper contends that webethnography is appropriate only where almost all interactions between group members occur online through the community site - that is, the community is a virtual community in the truest sense. Where communities conduct some or most of their interaction offline, webethnography is less appropriate as a stand-alone research method. Using a case study of project manager online communities on the social networking site www.LinkedIn.com, we argue that a triangulation with offline data sources helps to ensure data validity and generalisation to the group of interest. This paper presents a typology that proposes three general approaches to research design, to account for the differing scope of online cultural groups. The implications of this typology include the addition of additional precautions in the design of ethnographic studies.

This article seeks to explore some dimensions of the relationship between marketing research and theory, including the relationship between researchers and practitioners, using the lens on the debate around evidence-based management, with a view to stimulating debate within the marketing community. The article commences by introducing the concepts of evidence-based practice and management, and reviewing some of the challenges associated with integrating management and marketing research and practice. The following section visits the notion of ‘evidence’, including its link to mode 1 and mode 2 knowledge production. Finally, ten proposals for advancing evidence-based marketing and blurring the ‘practice–theory divide’ are proposed. These include peoplebased strategies, knowledge and inquiry-based strategies, and dissemination, communication and publication-based strategies.

This paper is aimed at exploring African children's attitudinal reactions to television advertisements. A total of 65 children from four African countries - Ghana, Nigeria, Kenya and Uganda - participated in 12 focus group discussions on the subject matter. Findings suggest that they like television advertising in relation to its entertainment features - especially when the messages feature children characters, cartoons, music, celebrities and humour - and those promoting foods. They also derive excitement from advertising messages that are presented in Pidgin language and/or humorously integrated with local languages. However, they have an aversion to messages that terrify them and those they consider boring. This paper supplements the existing literature on the attitudes of children to advertising, but from Africa as a different contextual platform. It also suggests directions for the effective use of marketing communications strategies in relation to television advertising for marketers and other bodies with special roles in communicating with children such as government agencies and NGOs.