Peter Mouncey
Editorial of IJMR Vol. 50, No. 3 (2008). ...

Chris Hackley
In this Viewpoint article, Chris Hackley describes some of the important consequences and issues for the industry when the media are faced with market research commissioned from different perspectiveson a high-profile topic – alcoholic drink marketing and consumption behaviour in the UK. He discusses the conflicting role of research in informing the debate on the subject, and a ...

Spike Cramphorn
This Viewpoint piece by Spike Cramphorn comments on some of the points within the Heath & Feldwick paper published in IJMR 50, 1, entitled ‘Fifty years using the wrong model of advertising’. He discusses some of the flaws of the historical methodology, but also shows the importance of establishing Outcome-Oriented-Objectives when testing advertising. ...

Jose Antonio Martínez and Laura Martínez Caro
Perceived quality, satisfaction and brand/corporate image/reputation are probably the most widely used variables to investigate customer attitudes in market research. Several models have been proposed to analyse the relationships between these variables and customer loyalty. All these models have a similar focus: to study the causal mechanism that relates customers’ evaluations ...

Marc Farr, Jessica Wardlaw and Catherine Jones
Market research is generally considered the realm of the private commercial sector. This paper presents an innovative use of market research methods in the public sector, in particular the use of geodemographics, to tackle health inequalities. The term ‘social marketing’ has been around for over 30 years, since Philip Kotler and Gerald Zaltman’s seminal paper of 1971, in which ...

Margaret Faulkner and Rachel Kennedy
This paper outlines a new pre-testing tool designed to identify which piece of direct mail will generate the best in-market response. The development process is described (interviews with fundraisers and donors as well as six pilot studies). The paper also details an in-market test of the tool in a fundraising setting. Importantly, the tool was tested on direct mail from split- ...

Howard R. Moskowitz and Birgi Martin
Respondent cooperation has always been an important topic for the market research industry. One consequence is that over time a number of initiatives have addressed the issue. This paper differs from the previous ones in that it deals with the issue of optimising the invitation to participate as if it were a consumer product or service. Using experimental design, the paper show ...

Jaywant Singh, Andrew Ehrenberg and Gerald Goodhardt
This paper measures patterns of loyalty for variants of a product, such as different pack sizes or flavour. Unlike brands, product variants are functionally highly differentiated. The study undertakes large-scale analysis of panel data and the results shows that product variants can attract markedly different loyalty levels. However, these different loyalty levels are closely r ...

María Pilar Martinez-Ruiz, Alejandro Mollá-Descals, Miguel Ángel Gómez-Borja and José Luis Rojo-Álvarez
This paper analyses the sales impact of temporary retail price discount on consumer goods product categories with different perishability rates, and provides some empirical findings regarding how the deal discounts of competing brands affect the sales substitution effects among them. We focus on the cross-price effects by considering both the asymmetric cross-price effect and t ...

Alan Wilson
A book review of the ESOMAR market research handbook, fifth edition, edited by Mario van Hamersveld and Cees de Bont, Wiley, 2007. ...

Eamonn Santry
A book review of The telephone interviewer’s handbook: how to conduct standardised conversations, by Patricia A. Gwartney, Jossey-Bass 2007. ...