International Journal of Market Research

This paper explores the influence of mental intangibility on the size of the consideration set, for both tangible products and services. The research also examines the moderating effect of purchase involvement and objective knowledge on the set. Two experimental studies were conducted to examine these relations. Overall, the results indicate that mental intangibility positively influences the size of the consideration set, regardless of the offering type (product or service). This effect is stronger in low levels of knowledge. Consumer involvement does not seem to have a moderating effect on this relation. The studies' implications and recommendations for future research are also discussed.

This paper suggests an alternative procedure to the rating of places according to the assumption that averaging data on a number of different criteria presents a valid representation of a general pattern. The UK media frequently publish articles reporting on research that rates places on various criteria, with indices that can be structured into league tables. Such indices are frequently based on statistical procedures that over-simplify the differences between places. Following a critique of such methods, an alternative procedure is presented and applied to the data used for the recent production of the UK Prosperity Index. It shows that the geographies of the 43 separate variables deployed in producing that index are more complex than can reasonably be assumed.

Given the increase in the volume of student mobility, this study explores how internationally mobile students, who are at the starting point of their life as global nomads, represent and give sense to the relationship with their brands in the context of relocation for study purposes. This qualitative research elicits the spontaneous and intimate reconstruction of young consumer-brand relationship dynamics in conditions of mobility by means of digital diaries. Evidence highlights the interactive and eudaimonic properties that young consumers attribute to branded objects for the support they provide in the fulfilment of their day-to-day activities and in the achievement of the challenges connected to the construction of their life project as mobile individuals.

The aim of this study is to extend an existing method to untangle the effect of taste (intrinsic) versus label information (extrinsic) on repurchase in a new-to-wine market. Results from a repeated discrete choice experiment (DCE) conducted before and after tasting a set of wines in China are compared with a control group that only performed the repeated DCE, but not the informed tasting. Fundamental differences were observed in choice response for the control group between the two sets, indicating a low stability of preferences and low test-retest reliability. There was a narrow range of responses for both the control and test groups, with an unusually high number of random choices recorded. The effect of extrinsic and intrinsic product attributes could not be determined. The method of combining discrete choice and tasting should be reassessed first in an established market. Other recommendations for conducting similar research in developing markets are discussed.

The main goal of this research is to study the impact on the answers and data quality of making conjoint questions more realistic by introducing some randomised noise into the descriptions of the conjoint levels or by simulating the way an e-commerce website displays products. Conjoint analysis is an advanced market research technique commonly used to estimate preference share for products and services with different attributes and levels. A common criticism of it is in regard to the repetitive nature of the questions. In order to study this, an experiment was implemented in Spain using 1,600 respondents from the opt-in online panel Netquest. The respondents were randomly assigned to one of the following four conditions: classic conjoint design without noise (control group); classic conjoint design with some random textual and numerical noise added to the attribute level descriptions; conjoint simulating e-commerce display of products but no noise; and conjoint simulating e-commerce display and some random textual and numerical noise. The four groups were compared in terms of data quality, survey evaluation and substantive results. The results show a directional but not statistically significant improvement of quality of estimations. In terms of survey evaluation, even if the improvements are not systematic, there is a clear tendency for an improved evaluation when an e-commerce layout is used, but not when random noise is used. Substantive results are not affected.

This study distinguishes two features of a firm's knowledge base - breadth and depth - and elucidates their interplay in determining new product performance. Papers drawing from the knowledge-based view of the firm often argue a positive role for knowledge base in new product development, however empirical evidence shows an equivocal relationship between knowledge base and new product performance. The empirical results from a sample of 192 high-tech firms indicate that a deep knowledge in a specific industry is imperative to a firm's new product success. However, the effect of knowledge breadth is contingent on knowledge depth: a firm's deep knowledge in a specific field causes a systematic shift in the effect of knowledge breadth, from a negative to a positive effect. In other words, knowledge breadth has a negative effect on new product performance for lower levels of knowledge depth, but a positive effect for higher levels of knowledge depth. These findings offer valuable managerial implications for knowledge management, i.e. if firms expand their knowledge base across various fields or submarkets, they need to correspondingly accumulate deep knowledge in each specific field to take advantage of a broad knowledge base.