Summary
Walmart, and its Sam's Club wholesale arm, are two of America's largest retailers. Tapping consumer insights in an enterprise of that scale presents a significant challenge, which the two organisations have sought to achieve through ensuring buy-in at senior level, creating insights that empower their target audience, and emphasising practicality to ensure the findings of research can be applied and make a measurable difference.

Summary
In this article, Lori Kneisler, General Motors' market research manager, reveals how the automaker is embedding the voice of the customer throughout its organisation. One essential aspect of this idea is ensuring that researchers are fully aware of the context in which vehicle design decisions are made, while another is making sure that engineers are fully versed in the insights gleaned from GM's diverse research efforts, thus facilitating a truly integrated approach.

Summary
This paper discussed how market researchers can create more business impact by putting more emphasis on their own human decision-making, and avoiding the risk of dramatically undercutting their own effectiveness by focusing on data alone. The authors outline the barriers that contribute to the phenomenon of market research generally not achieving its intended impact. To improve things, they advocate additional researcher training - particularly in the areas of stakeholder buy-in, and reporting efforts that engage the audience more effectively. Strong communication skills are also essential. The paper also highlights results of a research report on the issue conducted by the authors, the headline finding of which is that researchers themselves agree with marketers that they are not having enough of an impact.

Summary
Conducting market research in emerging economies can be difficult for many reasons, such as social inequality, violence, inefficient transportation or poor communications infrastructure. Helga Mora Santamaria and Catalina Mejía report on the work Colombian market research firm YanHaas carried out for the military forces there on perceptions of security. Researchers had to cope with travel restrictions imposed by unnamed individuals, intimidation and kidnap, all of which forced a re-appraisal of their methodology, in terms of sampling, questionnaire design, fieldwork and quality control.

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Rafiq Ullah Kakar, of Opinion Research Center of Afghanistan, outlines the myriad challenges faced in conducting good quality research in Afghanistan - a vast and insecure country. Researchers have to contend with violence, intimidation, corruption, ethnic, linguistic and gender differences, extensive illiteracy, hostility to research and strict cultural restrictions on access to households. His paper addresses what can be done to overcome these difficulties, including securing the help of village elders, implementing small development programs and operating a team of independent quality monitors. Three case studies highlight the dangers faced by interviewers.

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This paper outlines how Coca-Cola changed its approach to consumer behaviour in order to deal with an increasingly complex global beverage market. It outlines how the company collects and analyses its consumer research data from over 100 countries, as well as providing advice on how to respond to pressures the market research industry faces from new entrants, methodologies and technologies. It also emphasises the importance of its "protocol custodian", who oversees the application of the newly designed global framework and ensures it remains locally relevant without compromising global comparability. The paper also provides recommendations for the research industry and examples of the type of analysis that is conducted by Coca-Cola each month.

Summary
With businesses increasingly using design thinking for innovation, this paper explores the benefits of improv (short scenes usually constructed from a predetermined game, structure, or idea) and how it can be applied in different research spheres from workshop design to storytelling. It argues that improv or improvisation skills and principles can enable researchers to extend their domain expertise to support both ethnographic and ideation work.

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As an agency-trained researcher, the two years I spent as Head of Research at a mental health charity opened my eyes to the fact that mental health problems are 'invisible' and widespread, and that people with mental health problems regularly face exclusion. During this time I conducted many research projects among people with mental health problems, usually about mental health-related issues and services, through which I responded to feedback and constantly amended my approach to ensure that I was providing a high-quality and inclusive research environment. My attention was also drawn to the fact that many people with mental health problems are also consumers of mainstream products and services, and therefore form a notable proportion of the population of participants involved with mainstream research projects. In this article I will discuss 'best practice' ways in which mental health problems should be considered when conducting mainstream qualitative research projects, and focus groups in particular.

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TalkTalk, the telecommunications company, wanted to understand how word of mouth built advocacy among buyers of fixed line, broadband and television services. This paper describes a project with Spring Research to analyse how conversations about the TalkTalk brand were exchanged and opinions formed online. The authors identified different types of advocates and analysed the potential for word of mouth in the telecoms category. As part of the project, TalkTalk discovered that during the decision-making process it was falling down the list of brands considered by potential consumers. An approach to building customer advocacy, which was tailored to the type of advocate and also highlighted the importance of approaching advocates at the right stage in their contact with the brand, was implemented in response.

Summary
This paper describes a project by British Gas and Virtual Surveys to create a platform in which to engage consumers and to gather feedback on new products and services.It outlines how the organisers recruited customers to join a community and provided them with tools for interaction and feedback. The community was then used to test reaction to a new on-demand product for customers not contracted to British Gas, with the idea being withdrawn based on customer concerns.