International Journal of Market Research

Knowledge is power. It can help you transform the way you live and the way you do business, and can help you to reap benefits that you never thought possible. A small bit of information can enable you to take informed decisions in a proactive manner and save yourself the agony of various losses: time, money and so on. The client discussed herein is the world's leading provider of intelligent information for businesses and professionals. It wanted to empower the mass of the Indian population - the agricultural community - with basic information on weather, commodity prices and crop advice. The question was ‘How feasible is this?’ To answer this, the client partnered with IMRB International nearly five years ago. The research project was long drawn out and completed in varied stages, starting with checking the acceptance of a paper concept through a house-to-house survey of farmers, converting the same to a tangible offering upon acceptance and testing the same through central location testing, where all farmers were collectively given a demonstration of the product, their reactions recorded and, finally, a working model developed to be tested in real time by a select set of farmers to bring the finishing touches to the product. The client still touches base with subscribers through IMRB International, to garner post-usage feedback, satisfaction with services being provided and to discover any other thing that could be done better. From providing the service in one state, the client has progressed to successfully providing the service to 13 states in India. The service has enjoyed unprecedented success and is estimated to have been taken up by more than two million farmers through its usage and sharing in more than 15,000 villages. The decision-enabling nature of the information has had a direct impact on the livelihood of the farmers, enabling them to lead a better life through increased incomes and reduced losses. Individual farmers claim to have reaped significant return on their investment, achieving up to INR200,000 (US$4000) of additional profits, and savings of nearly INR400,000 (US$8000) by using this service, which costs roughly INR250 (US$5) for three months.

Rural markets have always been a challenge for market researchers. Conventional tools applicable in urban areas are not directly adaptable in the rural setting. With the emergence of rural markets in terms of brand awareness, and the shift from nominal decision-making process to a more extensive decision-making process, more innovative research tools are required to capture data about rural consumers in a more effective way. Participatory Rural Appraisal (PRA) is one tool that does precisely that. The tool itself, however, has evolved over time and has recently caught the attention of rural market researchers for commercial projects. The tool has so far been limited to application by NGOs for the implementation of either government projects or donor NGO-funded initiatives. This paper strives to highlight the evolution of PRA as well as its interpretation by MART (India's leading rural market research firm) in terms of one commercial project undertaken for a telecom player.

This paper describes an experiment in which a single questionnaire was fielded in four different styles of presentation: Text Only, Decoratively Visual, Functionally Visual and Gamified. Respondents were randomly assigned to only one presentation version. To understand the effect of presentation style on survey experience and data quality, we compared response distributions, respondent behaviour (such as time to complete), and self-reports regarding the survey experience and level of engagement across the four experimental presentations. While the functionally visual and gamified treatments produced higher satisfaction scores from respondents, we found no real differences in respondent engagement measures. We also found few differences in response patterns.

Peter Cooper founded Cooper Research & Marketing (CRAM). During his career he wrote many papers and gave frequent conference presentations worldwide, which have influenced the growth and diversification of qualitative research as practised now. He promoted a breadth of vision and eclecticism that enhanced the methods used today. Peter's influence was based on his breadth of knowledge, inventiveness, disrespect for the status quo, as well as his boldness, imagination and creativity. In this review of his contributions to qualitative research and marketing science, we focus on four key aspects - innovation, vision, professionalism and the achievements of qualitative research to bring about marketing successes.

Since currently there is no established, unitary and shared theory on consumer–brand engagement (CBE), this exploratory study is aimed at inductively proposing a preliminary conceptual framework of CBE disclosing the knowledge embedded in marketing practice. Our study is designed according to a Grounded Theory approach and it is focused on how practitioners conceive and pursue CBE through their branding strategies and tactics. Findings reveal that CBE is seen by practitioners as a dynamic and process-based concept evolving in intensity on the basis of the brand capability of increasingly intercepting consumers' desires and expectations using all possible physical and virtual touchpoints between brand and consumers. CBE appears as an overarching marketing concept encapsulating different consumer decision-making dimensions, from brand preference to brand purchase. Furthermore CBE emerges as a multi-dimensional construct that beyond traditional cognitive, emotional and conative dimensions seems to be based on emerging experiential and social dimensions that appear as its central elements.

In the context of key driver analysis in applied customer satisfaction research, the assumption of sample homogeneity (that single models perform adequately over the entirety of a survey sample) can be shown to restrict the value of the insights derived. While latent class regression has been used as a method of circumventing some of these issues, it is proposed that there are major barriers to both uptake and successful practical usage of the technique. Several of these issues are common to any multivariate technique, while others are specific to latent class regression. Following an examination of these issues, we introduce an alternative technique for deriving discrete latent classes, using a combination of genetic algorithms and (bivariate) correlations. This paper concludes that the proposed approach outperforms latent class regression in its ability to deliver action-orientated insights, and is better placed to assist marketers facing real-world research questions and datasets.

Recent studies on corporate social responsibility (CSR) illustrate the positive consumer reaction to the socially responsible practices of retailers, and outline the upside for retailers to engage in these practices. However, little is known about the downside of these practices: consumer negative reaction due to the ambiguous and complex nature of consumer reaction, and consumers' resistance to the ‘citizen argument’ put forth by retailers. This research, through 17 interviews, fills this gap to explore the complex nature of consumer reaction to CSR practices, and investigates motivations and manifestations of consumer resistance to the ‘citizen argument’ of mass-market retailers. The findings reveal consumer responses to CSR practices (their resistant behaviour), their causes, and classify them in two forms - resistance to the consumerist practice attributed to retailing, and resistance to an ‘insidious’ commitment to sustainable development where sincerity is claimed by the mass-market retailers.