International Journal of Market Research

This paper analyses the use of the term ‘market research’ in a contemporary context. Although the term is well established as an industry definition, its use and meaning have become increasingly contested. This study brings together empirical data from a range of sources that reflect key stakeholders within the market research sector. Findings suggest that the term ‘market research’ has become increasingly marginalised amongst these key stakeholders. Few of the leading research firms use this term to describe their core activity, and data suggest that wider use of the term has declined over the past decade. Where ‘market research’ is used, the term is typically demoted to describing a set of skills rather than a strategic concept around adding value. A number of explanations for this are explored, including isomorphism among research firms, the role of research in generating value, and the broader economic context in which research takes place. Finally, the paper considers whether continuing use of the term is beneficial to the future success of the research sector.

This paper hypothesises that conditional differential incentives can increase overall participation rates and the proportion of respondents who use a particular device in web surveys. Previous studies have not found effective ways of encouraging participants to use smartphones to complete web surveys. We conducted an experiment using a volunteer online access panel in Russia with 5,474 invitations sent to regular mobile internet users. We varied the invitation mode (SMS vs email) and encouragement to use a particular device for completing the survey: mobile phone or personal computer (PC). SMS increased the proportion of mobile web respondents, while email increased the proportion of PC web respondents. As expected, differential incentives increased the overall participation rates by 8–10 percentage points if higher incentives were offered for completing the survey on a mobile phone. Contrary to expectations, offering higher incentives to PC web respondents did not produce higher participation rates compared to the control condition. Both encouraging the use of a mobile phone and offering higher incentives were effective at increasing the proportion of respondents using mobile devices. In terms of both participation rates and the proportion of respondents using mobile devices, offering incentives 50% higher was as efficient as offering incentives 100% higher for mobile web respondents. Offering higher incentives to mobile web respondents also had an effect on sample composition. Significantly higher participation rates were found among females and those with higher education.

This study proposes that managing the marketing variables of product information, price, promotion and product distribution can mitigate the impact of negative online reviews (NOR). NOR are often inevitable, have a much wider reach, dwell much longer and threaten product sales. It is therefore necessary to understand how the negative impact can be managed more actively. The marketing variables are conceptualised for the e-commerce context. Analysis of objective data on 500 books supports the hypotheses and provides empirical evidence for the relative effectiveness of the variables. In addition to adapting the 4Ps framework of marketing management to the e-commerce context, this study highlights the need and potential to extend theoretical development and research efforts beyond the antecedents and effects of NOR to understand how to manage NOR. The findings have practical relevance for e-commerce businesses. Avenues for future research are also identified.

The authors propose a Plackett-Burman experimental design to rearrange profiles in blocks in choice-based conjoint analysis as an alternative technique for measuring preferences that accommodate large numbers of options. Although in choice-based conjoint analysis profiles are usually randomly organised in blocks, we propose a manually statistical arrangement because its design takes into account all the factors in the same number and equally distributed, and because it allows us to determine the degree of resolution in advance. Plackett-Burman can be an efficient design if we consider a tradeoff between the number of stimuli in each choice set and the number of choice sets used in the assessment process. To illustrate its uses we describe an empirical application measuring preferences for shocking warning messages on cigarette packages described in 11 pictures and we estimate the distribution of these on tobacco products to optimise impact on teenagers.

Multi-item rating scales are the accepted solution for achieving reliable and valid measures in the social sciences. Issues not fully resolved include the optimal number of response categories, choice of semantic rating versus Likert form, and the appropriateness of mixing positively and negatively expressed items. While there is considerable empirical research on these issues, it addresses the scaling of respondents and is yet to produce consensus as to the most appropriate practice. In marketing, multi-item scales are not only used to scale consumer respondents, they are used to scale marketing stimuli. This article examines these response format issues when the primary objective is to scale marketing stimuli rather than consumers using generalisability theory criteria for data quality. G-study website assessment data using different response formats are used to compare their effects on the observed variance components and G-coefficients for websites. Conclusions are drawn for the most appropriate response format to use in marketing studies that scale marketing stimuli.

This paper proposes the asymmetric rim weighting algorithm as an alternative to rim weighting (also called raking). The latter is currently a popular method for grossing up the results of a sample survey, but asymmetric rim weighting produces results that are more efficient and have fewer high weights, with little or no increase in processing time.