Seeing through a Glass Onion: broadening and deepening formative research in social marketing through a mixed methods approach

ABSTRACT

The purpose of formative research in social marketing is to understand the target audience to generate consumer insight, which informs the planning, development and initial implementation of social marketing programmes. Focus groups, interviews or surveys, all of which are self-report methods, are the most commonly reported methods employed in formative research. Reliance on a relatively narrow range of methods may constrain understanding and insight gained during formative research. This paper challenges social marketers to mix methods or use multiple methods and research perspectives to generate a broader understanding of the consumer and the context in which they behave. A case study is used to demonstrate how mixed methods were used in a formative research study to inform the development of a social marketing programme designed to change eating behaviour. Challenges of mixed methods are detailed along with recommendations for future research.     

The effect of the 2007 ethanol mandate on downside risk in agriculture: evidence from Kansas farmers

The Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007 increased the amount of corn ethanol that must be blended into motor vehicle and other fuels as part of the renewable fuel standard. The purpose of this article is to look at how the increase in demand for corn influenced the profitability and downside risk of farms. We conducted this investigation using annual data for more than 300 farms in Kansas from 1997 through 2014. We find that the probability of a farmer’s experiencing a negative return on equity (i.e. the ‘downside risk’ of farming) decreased by 25 percentage points after 2007.     

Commercializing Nascent Technology: The Case of Laser Diodes at Sony

To develop really new products, a company often needs to get a handle on really new technologies. Although some breakthrough products simply combine existing technologies in novel ways, other innovations require the successful commercialization of nascent technologies. In other words, such innovations depend on entirely new structures and methods that have been demonstrated in a research environment but have not yet been refined to the point where they are ready for production. The path from nascent technology to full-scale production presents numerous managerial challenges that must be overcome if a company is to develop really new products that involve really new technologies. Samuel Wood and Gary Brown discuss these challenges, and they describe methods for managing the successful commercialization of nascent technologies. They illustrate these methods by examining Sony's commercialization of laser diodes—semiconductor devices that play an important role in the operation of CD players and other optical disk readers. They divide the process of commercializing nascent technology into three stages: appropriation, implementation, and manufacture. The first stage—appropriation—involves monitoring, assessing, and capturing new technologies. Sony handles this stage with a small, loosely structured research organization, separate from the development organization. In this stage, management must ensure that the objectives pursued by the research organization support the development organization's long-term goals. To foster coordination between research and development, Sony employs such network-building techniques as internal research symposia and technology expositions, orientation periods for researchers, transferring managers between research and development, and transferring researchers to development and other functions. The implementation stage involves transferring knowledge to development, as well as refining the technology to the point where it is reproducible, testable, and documented. Sony facilitates technology commercialization by transferring project team members from research to development and making those people responsible for implementation. To reach the final stage, manufacture, the firm must find the means for developing and refining mass production tools and procedures. Meeting this challenge requires close interaction and integration between process and production engineers.     

Design principles for long‐lived Internet agents

Prior research on intelligent Internet agents has failed to address the needs of long‐lived data‐collecting agents, focusing instead on short‐lived transaction agents. Transaction agents typically run for a few seconds and retrieve information for a single transaction. With the staggering growth of electronic commerce, researchers and practitioners will want to design long‐lived data‐collecting agents that intelligently search for, retrieve, interpret, categorize, and store vast amounts of related information each time that they run. Such agents can run over the course of days rather than seconds and can be used by practitioners for decision support applications or by researchers as part of an empirical research methodology. This paper proposes a framework for agent sophistication, and emphasizes a number of design concepts for long‐lived Internet agents, including intelligence, validation, concurrency, recovery, monitoring, and interactivity. These concepts are used in the development of an illustrative tool called Electronic Data Retrieval LexicaL Agent (eDRILL), an object‐oriented data‐collecting agent. eDRILL is designed using the Unified Modeling Language (UML) and is written in Java. It gathers research data from an online auction. © 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The financial crisis and its impacts on global agriculture

The financial crisis arose in the industrial countries, but has affected developing countries through higher interest rates, sharp changes in commodity prices, and reductions in investment, trade, migration, and remittances. For most low‐income countries, shocks that affect food prices or wage rates for unskilled workers seem likely to have the biggest impact on poverty, with the declines in key food prices associated with the crisis helping to reduce poverty. Policies to address the crisis must include measures to deal with: financial sector problems; the resulting reductions in aggregate demand; and the particular vulnerabilities of poor people.     

Consumer satisfaction in retail stores: theory and implications

The substitution of small retail stores by the large stores has been a topic of debate among academics, practitioners, retailers and general public, especially in the context of foreign firms entering emerging markets such as China and India. The purpose of this research is to find out the determinants of consumer satisfaction in small and large retail stores in an emerging market, with a sample from India. Data were collected using a 39‐item structured questionnaire developed by the authors. The sample consists of 225 consumers who shop at retail outlets (Convenience sample of 125 consumers from small and 100 consumers from large stores respectively). Exploratory factor analysis grouped the 39 variables into 14 factors. Further, regression analysis revealed that six of the factors (Social desirability, staff friendliness, shopping economy, shopping ambience, family shopping and deal proneness) were major predictors of consumer satisfaction as they were found to be significant at 5% level. The significance of factors such as social desirability and staff friendliness imply that many consumers prefer those typical features of small stores, which in turn results in the likely coexistence of small retail formats in spite of the entry and proliferation of large retail stores from different countries. We posit three theoretical propositions to stimulate further research in this area.     

Exploring brand identity and entrepreneurship as drivers of small specialist retailer internationalisation: a German case study

While the comparatively sparse literature on small specialist retailing typically supports a proactive interpretation of the drivers of retail internationalisation, a more differentiated picture exists with regard to understanding the role of the brand construct in this process. The wider marketing literature recognises that brand identity, as well as brand image, can inform the process of internationalisation; yet, research focusing on small specialist retail internationalisation remains underdeveloped in this regard. Neither the notion of a multi-faceted brand concept nor its function as a strategic device in the internationalisation process has been analysed with sufficient depth. Furthermore, a better understanding of how and to what extent brand identity is interdependent upon the characteristics and activities of the entrepreneur is yet to emerge. This paper explores the construct of brand identity and its role within small specialist retail internationalisation, and the related influence of the entrepreneur on the internationalisation process. A case study approach is adopted, examining one German small specialist retailer. Data collection involved semi-structured interviews with owner-managers and other senior management, an assessment of company documentation as well as participant observation, providing in-depth insights into distinctive internationalisation patterns. The study finds that a simple ‘either-or’ approach, in terms of characterising the retailer’s motivation to internationalisation as being either reactive or proactive, is inadequate in understanding this particular case. Whilst initial motivation was characterised as being reactive, the motivations underpinning further planned internationalisation are determined to be more proactive. More particularly, analysis reveals how brand identity is considered to play an important role in the internationalisation of the case study retailer, and highlights the numerous ways in which the characteristics and activities of the entrepreneurial owner-managers impact the firm’s internationalisation. This research contributes to retail and management research concerning SME internationalisation as well as to the retail branding literature.     

Dual Circulation and China's Development

In 2020, China proposed a new development paradigm centered on domestic circulation with a "dual circulation" model in which domestic circulation and international circulation promote each other. This new paradigm reflects a clear understanding of China's development trend that saw its share of exports in the GDP declining steadily since 2006. However, the new paradigm does not necessarily mean that China should change its past policy of fully utilizing domestic and international markets and resources in economic development. Because of large economies of scale in modern manufacturing sector, China should continue to make full use of international markets.