Summary
This paper offers an overview of online communities and advice on how to run them, in order to maximise engagement among all stakeholders, including community participants themselves and the client company funding the project. Unlike social listening and online ethnography, online communities are created for the specific purpose of research, involving consumers who wish to engage and co-create with brands. A range of different types of such communities are described, as are their uses – from one-off product developments and innovations, to measuring customer satisfaction on an ongoing basis. For success, the paper argues that engagement is crucial on three levels, and offers guidance on creating it. ‘Natural’ engagement requires participants to have a genuine interest in the topic or the brand under investigation, in order to engage fully. Equally, ‘method’ engagement demands that researchers should propose questions in a fun and challenging way to increase participation and quality of input. Finally, ‘impact’ engagement is required for the research output to create internal engagement within the client organisation and effect change.

Summary
This study investigates the choice of consumer research methods in the fuzzy front end (FFE) of the new product development (NPD) process. First, it delivers an up-to-date overview of currently available consumer research methods for use in the FFE of NPD. Second, using an online questionnaire, we obtain insights into the use of these consumer research methods by B-to-C companies based in the Netherlands (N = 88, including many major multinational companies). Third, these companies provided the major reasons for choosing these methods, and specified the types of consumer information that they aim to gather using these methods. Finally, we investigate the influence of company size, type of products developed (durable/non-durable) and product newness on the use of these methods. Based on these findings, we build a contingency framework that helps companies to improve their choice of consumer research methods in the FFE, where consumer insights are most important for new product success.

Summary
This presentation examines a variety of classical survey measures and questions to establish which remain relevant to today's research needs and which do not. The fitness of traditional survey questions was tested in four areas (Awareness, Usage, Brand Image, Brand Equity), over two categories (laundry detergents and grocery stores) and in two countries (UK and China). Recommendations include: focus on First Mention awareness questions; replace all usage question formats with a simple Stated Share format: and ensure survey design is relevant to individual respondents.

Summary
In an attempt to leverage social media data within the context of traditional survey research, Ipsos OTX is changing its approach to conducting research by focusing on Socialised Research. Socialised Research blends traditional MR techniques with forward-thinking social media and technology solutions. This article outlines lessons learned, guidelines and considerations for these new approaches to MR. It is not easy to apply Socialized Research principles to traditional studies, however, the market research profession will be able to benefit from integrating social graph data into more datasets in the future. Benefits include bring able to leverage the demographic present in a respondent's Facebook profile to eliminate standardised profiling questions and can bridge the opinion vs. actual behaviour gap in typical market research surveys.

Summary
This paper argues that survey techniques which reflect behavioural economic insights, such as discrete choice modelling, outperform traditional techniques for predicting real world behaviour, such as the monadic test. Specifically, it claims that the monadic test, which is used to assess the probable success of innovations like new positioning, is flawed as consumers can be subject to influences that change their behaviour in unpredictable ways. The paper outlines both approaches and the outcome of tests used to demonstrate the effectiveness of discrete choice modelling.

Summary
Traditional ethnography focuses on identifiable cultural groupings of individuals and, through a process of observation and participant interviews (among other techniques), the researcher explores the effects of the social dynamic with regard to a topic of interest. Webethnography (also known as netnography, webnography, online ethnography and virtual ethnography) involves the application of ethnographic research methods to specific online communities through the observation and analysis of online dialogue and other online artefacts. This paper contends that webethnography is appropriate only where almost all interactions between group members occur online through the community site – that is, the community is a virtual community in the truest sense. Where communities conduct some or most of their interaction offline, webethnography is less appropriate as a stand-alone research method. Using a case study of project manager online communities on the social networking site www.LinkedIn.com, we argue that a triangulation with offline data sources helps to ensure data validity and generalisation to the group of interest. This paper presents a typology that proposes three general approaches to research design, to account for the differing scope of online cultural groups. The implications of this typology include the addition of additional precautions in the design of ethnographic studies.

Summary
This paper demonstrates how a cultural model was constructed and applied to gain a textured understanding of the new age Indian rural consumers (including the "rural rich") whose lives are significantly different from traditional (poor) rural consumers. At the core of this model is Participatory Rural Appraisal (PRA), a popular social research method that was successfully adapted to understand the affluent rural consumers. This was flanked by ethnography, material anthropology and trend spotting each complementing the other to generate actionable insights.

Summary
This paper introduces a new approach for consumer-based ideation. The effectiveness of this new approach is demonstrated by applying the method to table salt: if new ideas can be created for developing such an ordinary product, then it should be possible to apply the approach to more interesting and diverse categories. The test project involved housewives between the ages of 30-45, and proved that creativity does not just sit with "trend setters": everybody is equipped with the ability to innovate.

Summary
Social media data extraction tools enable analysts to develop a search query for a brand and a related sub-topic (e.g. price), which is then used to extract relevant posts from existing social media data. However, this paper from J.D. Power argues that the number of potential ways a consumer will discuss a topic means each analyst will have a different strategy for generating queries. Specifically, this can mean different results and conclusions can be obtained by analysts attempting the same data search, which has the potential to significantly impact bottom-line business decisions. By focusing on telecom products as a case study, the paper establishes social media standards around query development including developing Boolean logic templates aimed at improving accuracy, validity, and reliability. It also emphasises the importance of utilising a quality control team to ensure that the extracted data addresses the business questions being researched.

Summary
This paper looks at the research capabilities in CEE, which are most affected by three factors: socio-demographic diversification, availability of technical facilities and methodological background. The main focus is to show what kind of methodological circumstances should be taken into consideration in carrying out CEE research projects, while avoiding thinking about the region as a group of similar countries.