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The purpose of this paper is to explore introspection in marketing research, its controversial origins, its positioning as an art form, the possibilities and the pitfalls of research based on this method, and how to successfully enter into its creative spirit.

Although its overall approach is broadly conceptual, in a similar fashion to the dramatic device of a‐play‐within‐a‐play, the paper makes a habit of using introspection to reflect on introspection.

While it is clear that well‐written introspections can deliver rich stream‐of‐consciousness accounts of marketing‐relevant goodness from beginning to end, they provide more than just frivolous entertainment. The innermost imperative of introspection equates well with consumption, creativity and aestheticisation, the corner‐stones of arts marketing.

The inherent mucky‐mindedness of introspection as a formal method lays its success or failure on the shoulders of the paper's author.

Whatever their interpretive methodology of choice, arts marketers, indeed all marketers, should give serious thought to integrating introspection into their research approach.

While many of the ideas in the paper are pilfered from other sources (see long list of references), the author is proud to assert that precisely these words have never been written in precisely this order.

Research findings support the view that a multiple methods approach is necessary to surface the substantial amount of relevant thinking processes that occur both consciously and unconsciously within different phases of consumer decision making. Chapter 5 advocates viewing all studies that ask informants questions as representative of researcher–informant introspections. Because answers to questions differ substantially depending on how the questions are framed, applying multiple, explicit, question frames to acquire conscious and unconscious thoughts in researcher–informant introspections is helpful. This chapter reviews multiple methods, including metaphor elicitation of unconscious thinking, useful for achieving and confirming thick descriptions of conscious and unconscious thinking associated with informants’ deep-seated beliefs and observable actions.

This paper aims to explore the relationship between introspection and key competencies for sustainable consumption (KCSCs). It investigates whether mindfulness training can cultivate the ability to introspect and stimulate the development of KCSCs.

Two independent studies were analyzed. Data were retrieved from interviews with participants of a consumer-focused mindfulness training (Study 1, 11 participants), as well as from diaries of students attending a university seminar with mindfulness training (Study 2, 13 students), and made subject to qualitative content analysis.

Both studies show a clear intersection between both constructs and suggest that mindfulness training can contribute to the development of KCSCs and learners’ ability to introspect. The studies also demonstrated that introspection is not equally related to all competencies and that KCSCs must not be reduced to introspection.

Both KCSCs and introspection are complex and latent constructs and hence challenging to observe. The research understands itself as a first exploratory approach for empirically investigating this complex relation.

While increasing (self-)reflectivity is at the core of competence-based education, a systematic engagement with the practice of introspection as a means to enhancing reflectivity is surprisingly lacking. Mindfulness training could be a promising way to cultivate introspective abilities and thus facilitate learning processes that are conducive to competence development.

The purpose of this paper is to discuss within a corporate context the advantages and limitations of combining different qualitative methods (namely consumers’ introspection and observation) to grasp consumer experiences.

The paper reflexively examines the evolution of a research process through which a team of researchers and a company tried to understand how the online consumer experience unfolds. The paper discusses the research process, the problems addressed and the way results were shared and acted upon within the company.

The findings show how the search for and implementation of the combination of observation and introspection is rooted in the kinds of organizational change processes that allow companies to appropriate new methodological approaches and modify the conduct of their service innovation processes.

The paper is based on a single research project, analysed only retrospectively and reflexively. As to its implications, the proposed qualitative methods help mediate the collaborative interaction between researchers and the company during a research project.

The research findings already have been appropriated and used by a multidisciplinary working group, operating within a corporate environment. Similarly, other companies can manage this type of research process following three major guidelines: prepare the cultural background, be iterative and maintain a conversation.

The paper offers a unique account of the process of using combined qualitative methods within a company to understand consumer experiences.

The purpose of this paper is to describe the rationale and use of subjective personal introspection (SPI) as a methodological approach.

SPI was utilised to develop a “narrative” of the author's own “action‐oriented” research experience within a multisector collaborative venture established by 13 partner organisations representing the academic, pharmaceutical industry and government sectors. The “confessional” stance that the study assumes describes some of the perceived tensions enacted during field work. The SPI approach is theoretical and reflective, as well as descriptive and analytical, in reporting the antecedents, actions, and outcomes in action‐oriented research.

Because the focus of the paper is subjective, personal, and introspective, it does not illustrate “findings” about multisector collaboration, but rather reflections and insights about the way the research was conducted.

The paper widens the forum for incorporating SPI beyond the consumer behaviour context to the context in which action‐oriented researchers incorporate introspection in their study of organisations.

The paper goes some way to bridging the gap between SPI and reflexivity (if there is indeed a gap) and it causes qualitative, action‐oriented organisational researchers to contemplate a number of questions: what is the role of the researcher; what is the source of their authority to narrate and what are they authorised to recount; and what are the consequences of this?

This paper aims to elucidate health-related transformations experienced by an individual. Building from personal experience offers an understanding of the relational dynamics at play within health transformations, which makes a contribution to realising and facilitating the agency of the patient in systems of integrated care.

Introspection can be used as a methodology to elucidate messy and personal affective experiences. The author’s introspection is an 18-month catalogue and analysis from diagnosis of breast cancer through significant stages of rehabilitation. Reflexive introspection has gained traction in health research due to its cathartic benefits, whilst this approach offers much; a key challenge for integrated care is translating deeply personal and subjective introspections into strategic-level application.

Using Turner’s (1969) concept of liminality, this research explicates key relational dynamics of health-related transformations experienced by an individual. By recognising changes in affective being as a pivotal point in rehabilitation, this work links embodied transformation as a critical antecedent to a patient’s willingness to engage his/her agency in their rehabilitation.

Whilst recognising that integrated care is patient-centred and seeks to incorporate the patient’s voice, this research gives insight into how the author, as a patient, engaged her agency in her rehabilitation through building her own transformed personal ontologies of health.

The study uses assisted-subjective personal introspection (ASPI) to analyze, assess, and critique a traveler's adventure as well as uncover the rationale behind why participating in a long trip with global implications was important to this traveler. Coupled with a thorough ASPI analysis, the study constructs an autoethnography: a form of autobiographical personal narrative that explores a traveler's experience of life. To equip the traveler with the necessary skills and tools to perform this analysis, the study includes research using ASPI and autoethnography. Finally, participating in Harvard University's “Implicit Association Test” (IAT) provides an external analysis and better understanding of own conscious–unconscious divergences. Using causal mapping, the study delineates a 14-week trip into weekly increments identifying positive and negative relationships while assessing the strengths of those relationships. The goal of this exercise is twofold: (1) to increase understanding of the human condition and (2) how that understanding can influence international marketing.

Naïve subjective personal introspection includes the failure to recognize the confirmability of one's own attitudes and personal meanings learned explicitly from self-examining such topics and explaining one's own behavior. Unconscious/conscious theory of behavior explanation follows from unifying the research on unintended thought–behavior with folk explanations of behavior. Chapter 6 describes advances in research confirming own attitudes and personal meaning and suggests the need for applying multiple methods to overcome the fundamental attribution error, inherent cultural prejudices, and the general bias toward self-fabrication. The discussion is valuable for achieving a deep understanding of how customers think, advancing from subjective to confirmatory personal introspection, and understanding the need to apply research tools useful for enlightening knowledge and overcoming the inherent bias within subjective personal introspection.

Reports on the use of subjective personal introspection. Offers a brief overview of subjective personal introspection and then describes the technique used to inform an ongoing piece of research that is being conducted into popular music consumption. Concludes by assessing the usefulness of the technique and highlights how it may be of use to practitioners.

This paper aims to explore tourism consumer’s perceptions of cultural, emotional and behavioural differences. The subjective personal introspection (SPI) approach is used to investigate specific cultural differences which impact tourism satisfaction. It aims to identify the key attributes of cultural tourism satisfaction by comparing three European cities. The cultural attributes are synthesised into a confirmatory personal introspection (CPI), and a provisional research model is proposed.

The research data of the cultural experiences are based on SPI data of “native-visitors” to London and ordinary visitors to Venice and Barcelona. The duration and the travel arrangements are the same for all three cultural experiences. The CPI uses thought experiments to formulate new research propositions.

The SPI results show that the tourism gaze focus can be the cognitive-affective experiences of cultural holidays. Tourism consumer satisfaction is dependent on the quality of natural and man-made attractions and the social-emotional interactions between the hosts and guests in a destination. The three cities in our research, London, Venice and Barcelona, have different micro-cultures and levels of social-emotional interactions vary considerably between them. Overall tourism satisfaction is hypothesised to be influenced by the degree of social interaction and micro-cultural differences.

The findings support the usefulness of SPI in tourism consumer research. SPI research findings produce in-depth understandings of the cultural tourism product attributes which cannot be captured in any other way. The personal insights are valuable to marketing professionals because they provide first-hand feedback of consumer’s perceptions over a longer period than a focus group session. The confirmatory introspections are valuable hypotheses to be tested empirically with specific tourism segments to identify product strengths and weaknesses as well as opportunities and threats.

The use of SPI and CPI produces original hypotheses of the cultural tourism attributes which influence tourism satisfaction. The paper demonstrates that the tourism gaze can be expanded to investigate the cognitive-affective observations which have a direct effect on tourism satisfaction and decision-making.