International Journal of Market Research

The anonymisation of personal data has multiple purposes within research: as a marker of ethical practice, a means of reducing regulation and as a safeguard for protecting respondent privacy. However, the growing capabilities of technology to gather and analyse data have raised concerns over the potential reidentification of anonymised datasets. This has sparked a wide-ranging debate among both academic researchers and policy makers as to whether anonymisation can continue to be relied upon. This debate has the potential to create important implications for market research. This paper analyses the key arguments both for and against anonymisation as an effective tool given the changing technological environment. We consider the future position of anonymisation and question whether anonymisation can retain its key role given the potential impact on both respondent trust and the nature of self-regulation within market research.

This paper presents a case study that reveals how stakeholders in the research process, by recommending specific data collection and analytical techniques, exert significant ‘hidden’ influence on the decisions made on the basis of market research findings. While disagreements among stakeholders regarding research design are likely, the possibility that strategies adopted by companies are dependent upon stakeholder research preferences has not been adequately addressed in the literature. Two widely used quantitative customer satisfaction evaluation approaches, involving stated and derived importance, are compared within a real-life market research setting at an international bank. The comparative analysis informs an ongoing debate surrounding the applicability of explicit and implicit importance measures, and demonstrates how recommendations are dependent upon the methodological and analytical techniques selected. The findings, therefore, have significant implications for importance-based satisfaction market research planning, and highlight the need to consider the impact of stakeholder preferences on research outcomes.

Brand attributes play an important role in tracking customer-based brand equity. Therefore researchers need an effective approach for eliciting attributes. This paper has two aims: to determine which of four different techniques elicit(s) better results; and to test if online data collection is a viable alternative to face-to-face collection. The techniques compared are: Zaltman Metaphor Elicitation Technique (ZMET), Free Elicitation (FE), Repertory Grid (RG) and Projective Elicitation (PE). These approaches are compared on the number and variety of attributes generated, as well as respondent evaluation. FE is the best-performing technique in a face-to-face context, generating the most attributes, evaluated positively by respondents and providing a typical distribution of attribute types. We also provide evidence that online is a viable data collection method for attribute elicitation studies, except ZMET due to respondent drop-out. Online we recommend a combination of FE and PE to obtain a range and variety of responses.

This research proposes a new method for computing consideration set size as the sum of the associative penetrations (or the ‘mental’ repertoire). This multi-cued non-attitudinal measure represents the chances of retrieving brands from memory, or the average number of salient brands. It is consistent with developments in memory theory and conceptually similar to a behavioural measure, i.e. purchase repertoire size. As such, it offers a stronger conceptual framework and a more robust empirical basis for comparisons between the cognitive and behavioural dimensions of consumer choice. This measure and the underlying theoretical approach is validated through empirical analysis across multiple categories, which includes: (i) appraisal of the extent to which the ‘mental’ repertoire is larger yet correlated with the behavioural (or purchase) repertoire; (ii) appraisal of the extent to which this relationship reveals the expected usage effect in brand image data; and (iii) a clarification of whether the interplay between retrieval propensities and purchase propensities in determining repertoire size is borne out by observation. The new approach enables individual brand-level diagnostic benchmarks to be specified. It also provides insights for marketing practice, including a framework by which marketing strategies may affect retrieval and purchase propensities differently.

Deal of the day is a form of e-commerce in which an intermediary allows merchants access to a subscriber list, to promote their offerings at a discount. This study performs a cluster analysis on the purchase history of a deal intermediary, to identify customer segments based on their purchase frequency, price sensitivity and the types of deal they buy. Five segments were identified, including a large group of customers who made one purchase and then stopped buying, a small group of extremely deal-prone subscribers, and a segment that limits their purchases to very few types of product (e.g. restaurant meals or spa treatments). The findings further show that targeting deals to specific customers may be desirable in the future to prevent information overload and ensure loyalty.

This paper uses the experiential marketing concept to explain some of the motivations for socially responsible consumption. It is argued that practising responsible behaviour helps consumers to perceive five different types of experiential value: emotional, cognitive, sensory, relational and behavioural. A web-based survey on a panel of more than 1,000 North American respondents confirmed the presence of an average level of each experiential value type in responsible decisions. We also found evidence for gender and age differences in the perception of those experiential benefits. This study provides guidelines to better promote socially responsible consumption through enriching consumers' experiential motivations. The findings of this study also provide ideas for demographic-based targeting of responsible goods/services.