Editorial

Citation

Tiu Wright, L. (2005), "Editorial", Qualitative Market Research, Vol. 8 No. 3. https://doi.org/10.1108/qmr.2005.21608caa.001

Editorial

The majority of the papers in this issue have strong organizational learnings where the authors have conducted researches within organizations to understand better how their processes work and their employee perspectives with regard to brand promise, employee relationships, team working and implications for their managers.

The issue starts with a “Viewpoint” by Clive Boddy who draws on his wealth of experience as a practitioner in the market research industry. There is a brief overview of the geographic, historical and scientific sources of this confusion with the suggestion for a reduction in the number of terms used. He puts the case for greater clarity from writers on the subject of focus groups in defining and explaining their purposes as the ground rules for their management and implementation vary widely within each country and between countries. While there is richness in variety there can also be problems in comparisons and evaluations of outcomes emanating from the present confusion in terminology. This Viewpoint might serve to open up a debate with qualitative researchers about how practitioners and academics from different cultural backgrounds and scientific traditions can come to terms to agree on.

Focus groups are employed in a very wide range of research studies. The use of focus groups in an exploratory setting is demonstrated by the first paper from Carmel Herington, Don Scott and Lester Johnson who have set themselves the task of discovering elements of firm-employee relationships and the strengths of these relationships with employees. They report on qualitative research with four focus groups of employees in medium to large regional and national Australian companies. A model of firm-employee relationship strength is built up with comparisons of focus group findings and the literature. The authors make the point that the literature does not adequately cover this topic as the literature does not yet provide guidance for measuring firm-employee relationships. Perhaps the authors should not use the word “measure” as qualitative research does not measure in the sense that a quantitative method would do. The value of qualitative research is present in the uncovering and evaluation of the important indicators of relationship strength. The set of key relationship indicators which differs from other non-marketing relationship literature is useful to have. This paper is an example of how a focus group study can add meaning to organizational relationships by looking at elements of cooperation, empowerment, communication, attachment, shared goals and values, trust and respect.

The value of the second paper from Ceridwyn King and Debra Grace in Australia lies in their attempt to present evidence via qualitative research into employees’ roles in delivering the brand promise. Brand promise is a seductive term and one which manufacturers and retailers have grappled incessantly with. How does one guarantee customer loyalty through the promise of tangible benefits and intangible satisfaction from such brands? There are numerous examples of brands in the world and this paper from Australia gives an insightful view of how a brand promise can be delivered from an internal perspective by utilising a qualitative methodology. The authors argue that their research is empirical and has relevance both internationally and across industries. To increase greater trustworthiness and credibility in their results the authors use a case study database and semi-structured interviews with managers of a customer-focused organization. The themes identified include the “internal marketing, management role, direction, employee satisfaction, enhancers and element of control”. Employees have a critical place in the firm for delivering the brand promise since it is they who facilitate the interactions between the organization and the customer. The literature to date has not covered this area adequately so this study is a useful contribution in discovering and examining what employees represent as a resource in supporting an organization’s brands.

The third paper comes from an academic (Clive Nancarrow) and two research practitioners (Andy Barker and Jason Vir) who set out the four pillars of Ritzer’s theory concerning the ways in which firms can follow the McDonaldisation path to expansion and success. These four pillars provide the basis for discussion about how useful the aspects of efficiency, calculability, predictability and control are to managers and others seeking to follow the McDonaldisation route. The insights are relevant because the authors see much international research as standardised “rather than efficacy focused”. This paper adds to the debate about standardisation and adaptation of company marketing policies overseas. It is refreshing to find a paper that gives strong guidance and justifications about the commercial values of reassurance, trust, predictability and so forth. Clearly, organizations looking to emulate the successful growth of McDonald’s can look to following these aspects in international markets or for conducting overseas research.

The fourth paper by Charles Okigbo, Drew Martin and Osabuohien Amienyi is a joint effort from the USA and Australia to provide a qualitative, exploratory content analysis of American advertisements. The authors draw on the deep rootedness of cultural values to show how people process information in social communications. Their analysis of the visual, textual and style of contents of 2,158 advertisements found in popular US magazines showed a dominance of US cultural values. The authors argue for an adaptive strategy based upon their consideration of “individualism, monochronic time patterns and low-context communications” they found in the advertisements. The authors are wise to advocate caution given that advertisements change with the progress of society over time and with advertisers’ circumstances which represent their advertised snapshots in time. As the authors show, due to advertising’s pull these “cultural artifacts are embedded in attention-grabbing copy”. There is a sense that advertisements both reflect and distort social values so care needs to be taken by advertisers. However, commercial reality might win in more ways than one when advertisers jostle for pride of place to gain prominence for their advertised content. So further research needs to be done. While this paper does a useful job of drawing attention to advertisements highlighting the sense of cultural values the problem that the paper faces, indeed one that is recognised by the authors themselves is that the jury is still out since advertisements continually change and evaluating their differences over time requires a much larger cross-cultural study.

Utilising resource-based and human capital theory the last paper by Elisa Fredericks from the USA shows how firms can be effective with their cross-functional teams to gain competitive advantage. New product development is prone to risk and uncertainty. As the author states, it is a “difficult-to-imitate and heterogeneous process requiring the exchanging and combining of divergent skills, knowledge and abilities in order to achieve project and organizational goals”. So the process of sharing information and working together is highly dependent on good solid relationships being established between cross-functional team members. As anyone with experience of working in organizations knows, it can be difficult for information sharing to take place due to a host of myriad problems that can occur between different levels of organizations. Her research throws light on cross-functional product development with the inclusion of semi-structured interviews undertaken with 11 firms and 20 teams from finance, manufacturing, marketing, purchasing, research and development, software development and sales. As she states, “both high and low technology-oriented projects were evaluated to determine cross-functional involvement across the new product development processes in consumer and industrial firms”.The qualitative findings make a valuable contribution to this issue as there are relatively few research papers that deal with the important topic of NPD from the internal team members’ perspective.

The Internet Research Section from Rehan ul-Haq features an evocative and personal view of the history and development of the Internet over the past 25 years. This view comes from an IT expert, Omar Rafiqi, who has much experience from both ends of the spectrum ranging from multi-billion pound organizations to small firms. This is an insider view of how even the greatness of organizations can be humbled by the seemingly vast potential of the Internet to enhance or limit their enterprises. The search by practitioners and academics to continually “reduce the complex, ambiguous, diversity of life and human behaviour into manageable and generalisable findings” makes his piece on the Internet highly relevant. For market researchers the Internet is as important for gathering market intelligence as it is for validating source data. His efforts to assist clients in their IT to enable them to carry out their strategic decisions and marketing programmes shows how the Internet’s scope can be harnessed in intelligent applications to problem solving.

The Book Review Section takes a favourable look at A Companion Guide To Qualitative Research. I use the word “favourable” because a book that is compiled of many articles from people with expertise in the varied topics and wide ranging fields in qualitative research in a successful manner deserves some praise.

I end with thanks to all authors for their contributions.

Len Tiu Wright lwright@dmu.ac.uk