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This paper seeks to investigate the use of projective techniques in Asia‐Pacific markets with particular reference to Taiwan and to compare this with the literature on cultural differences in conducting research to see if any correspondence exists.

The paper is based on a literature review and a small qualitative study of indigenous and expatriate market researchers who work or had recently worked in South Korea, Hong Kong, China, Taiwan and Indonesia.

The paper concludes that the use of projective techniques in Asia‐Pacific can be usefully guided by an understanding of the different cultures there compared with the cultures in the UK and other western markets. It illustrates that projective techniques are as used and are as useful in market research in Asia‐Pacific as they are in the UK.

The research fills a gap in the literature and extends knowledge of how projective techniques are used in Asia‐Pacific markets.

Normal “mixed method” approaches to research – using standard quantitative surveys supported by qualitative methods such as semi‐structured interviews, often fail to measure issues “outside of the fence”. The purpose of this paper is to consider whether the challenges of bounded rationality can, in part, be addressed by including projective techniques within the “mixed methods” approach. In particular, it discusses the role of information and communication technologies (ICT) in such an approach.

The results of an international pilot study into the use of projective techniques in assisting the evaluation of policies is outlined. The study is concerned with the response of small businesses to governments' policies aimed at encouraging the adoption of ICT. This is used as the basis of a discussion of the appropriateness of using ICT in such an approach.

ICT could play an important role in the use of projective techniques – including design; improving reliability and validity; distribution; analysis and interpretation.

Much more research is needed before the appropriateness of (ICT based) projective techniques can be assessed fully.

The lessons learnt from this pilot study about the use of projective techniques as part of a “mixed methods” survey methodology was explored. In particular, the paper provides some practical suggestions as to how ICT might be used to reduce the overheads involved in implementing projective techniques.

For many people involved in traditional quantitative and qualitative research the usefulness and appropriateness of projective techniques have yet to be proven. This paper contributes some new thinking about how ICT might address some of the concerns over the suitability of projective techniques as part of a mixed methodology.

This paper aims to examine the use of projective techniques for published marketing and management research in the USA. The paper emphasizes the influence that McClelland, Atkinson, Clark and Lowell's study, The Achievement Motive (1953), has had on subsequent research. That work applied quantitative analysis to responses obtained using projective techniques.

The approaches used in this paper consist of descriptive historical methods and a literature review. The historical analysis was conducted using Kuhn's 1967 conception of paradigms, showing that the paradigm from which projective techniques emerged – psychoanalysis – failed to gather many adherents outside the discipline of psychology. The paradigm failed to gain adherents in US colleges of business, although there are some exceptions. One exception is managerial motivation research, which built on the traditions of The Achievement Motive. The literature review suggests that, despite lacking institutional bases that could be used to develop new adherents to the paradigm, projective techniques were used by a number of researchers, but this research was marginalized, criticized or misunderstood by adherents of the dominant paradigm, positivism.

Some of the criticism directed at projective techniques research by positivists involves criticism of the paradigm's assumption that humans have an unconscious, and a belief that projective techniques are unreliable and invalid. This paper points out that a growing number of cognitive psychologists now accept the existence of an unconscious, and measure it using the “implicit association test.” This paper argues that the IAT is an associational test is the tradition of word association. Moreover, the literature review shows that projective techniques are much more reliable than critics contend, and exhibit greater predictive validity than many positivist instruments.

As with all literature reviews, this one does not include every published research study using projective techniques. As a consequence, the conclusions may not be generalizable to the studies excluded from the analysis.

The paper is one of the few to assemble the literature on projective techniques used in several disciplines, and draw conclusions from these about the applicability of the techniques to market research.

This paper aimed to focus on political marketing and utilised a number of projective techniques to explore the UK Conservative Party’s “brand image” amongst young adults aged 18-24 years. There is little guidance in the extant literature regarding projective technique analysis. Furthermore, there are explicit calls for insight and more understanding into the analytical process. Responding to this identified gap in the literature, this paper provides an illustrative guide that can be used to analyse and interpret findings generated from qualitative projective techniques.

This paper opted for an exploratory study using focus group discussions, combined with qualitative projective techniques. Eight two-hour focus group discussions were conducted with 46 young citizens aged 18-24 years from three locations in England. Focus groups were conducted prior to the 2010 UK General Election. The data from the projective techniques were thematically analysed by the researcher.

This research provides insight into the broad process used to analyse and interpret the qualitative projective expressions in relation to the UK Conservative Party’s brand image from the perspective of young adults. Furthermore, this paper highlights that projective techniques can provide an insight into underlying feelings and deep-seated attitudes towards political parties, candidates and the positive and negative aspects of brand image.

Several limitations became apparent at the end of this study. As this is a qualitative study, findings cannot be generalisable to the wider population. Additionally, it is important to note that the researcher had limited experience of conducting focus group discussions combined with projective techniques, and this can be considered a limitation. Nevertheless, the researcher did attend professional “effective depth interviewing” training delivered by the “Marketing Research Society” before data collection. This goes some way in addressing this limitation.

This paper provides an illustrative guide and insight into the analytical process that can be used to analyse and interpret findings generated from qualitative projective techniques. This can be used by academics with little experience of projective techniques. Furthermore, this framework may be useful for practitioners such as marketers, political parties and candidates to explore and analyse the external image of other political brands. The elicitation ability of qualitative projective techniques facilitates greater expressive insight that may remain hidden if traditional direct data collection tools such as interviews and questionnaires are used.

This paper provides some understanding into how to analyse subjective meaning such as feelings, attitudes, perceptions and associations revealed through projective techniques. Furthermore, projective techniques can provide access to the private conscious and unconscious inner-world of the participant. They allow respondents to express themselves with greater detail and discussion compared with direct questioning. This research, therefore, presents greater insight in managing and analysing expressions generated from this non-intrusive approach that can encourage open disclosure with less hesitancy, verbally less demanding and suitable to overcome emotional, language and cultural barriers.

This paper adds to the under-researched and undefined practice of analysing projective expressions by providing an illustrative process to interpret and understand insight generated from qualitative projective techniques. Thus, answers the explicit calls for detailed guidance in this area of research. This was achieved by critically reviewing and adapting the approaches taken by Boddy, 2005, Butler-Kisber, 2010 and Hofstede et al., 2007 and incorporating them into a pragmatic systematic framework. This research could be used as a foundation for future studies and a point of reference for people with limited knowledge of projective technique analysis.

Explores the rationale for, and value of, using projective and enabling techniques in qualitative market research and in particular their application to researching “sensitive” issues. Defines these techniques and illustrates their usage through a case study of research conducted by the Centre for Social Marketing, University of Strathclyde. Concludes with a discussion focusing on the relevance, suitability and level of applicability of projective and enabling techniques to market research.

This paper outlines a variety of the research on student attrition and recognises some of the sensitivities that may be involved for some students in dealing with dropping out of university. This paper claims that because of these sensibilities, some student’s responses to direct questions about the reasons for attrition may be biased by social desirability. The purpose of this paper is to get beyond social desirability bias to examine a fuller range of reasons for student retention and attrition.

In an exploratory investigation, this research study uses a projective technique which helps to circumvent the conscious defences of respondents. The projective technique is based on the “thematic apperception test” and uses a “bubble drawing” to elicit emotional and more socially undesirable responses.

All first-year students appear to consider leaving university, and emotional considerations involving loneliness and homesickness are much more prominent than most quantitative studies acknowledge. For example, in this research, social concerns are twice as prominent as financial concerns, whereas in past survey research, financial concerns have been identified as most prominent.

To retain students, universities need to provide new students with real care and support, especially in their first few weeks at university. To study retention comprehensively, researchers need to go beyond the confines of positivist research.

This is the first study that uses a projective technique to investigate student retention and attrition. By going beyond a merely positivist approach to research, a fuller, deeper and more complete understanding of the wide extent and profound nature of the emotional issues involved in student attrition and retention is gained.

The purpose of this paper is to utilise projective techniques as a method to capture and understand consumer reactions to celebrity‐endorsed perfumes. The paper illustrates how projective techniques can aid practitioners in their selection of celebrity endorsers.

The paper is part of a wider tradition of returning to qualitative methods when research based on existing theories offers only partial or little support for them. In total, 16 females participated in the study, which utilised a range of projective techniques, including picture association. For the latter, participants were exposed first to advertisements for two leading perfumes alone and then these advertisements incorporating four contrasting celebrity endorsers. Associations and reactions to the advertisements with and without celebrity endorsers were compared.

The analysis identifies that celebrity endorsers may have a significant impact on the perceived target market for a product, highlighting their potential role in repositioning a brand. However, the celebrity may crowd out the endorsed product. The role of personal liking is critical, although this is ignored in existing source models of celebrity endorsement.

The application of projective techniques demonstrates their usefulness in capturing responses to celebrity endorsements. The paper uncovers some of the reasons why previous research has generated results that only partially support the existing main theoretical frameworks.

The purpose of this study is to examine the use of visual research methods in the area of recent marketing and consumer research.

Content analysis was used to investigate visual method in articles from Journal of Consumer Research; Journal of Marketing; Journal of Marketing Research; Journal of Marketing Management; Consumption, Markets, and Culture and Qualitative Market Research. Abstract, key words and methodology sections of all articles published in these six journals from 2002 to 2012 were scanned to identify which of them applied visual methods in their studies. The selected articles were then closely analyzed to discover how visual research methods were used and in what manner did they contribute to the marketing and consumer behavior discipline.

This study found that a growing number of marketing and consumer researchers utilized visual methods to achieve their research goals in various approaches such as cultural inventories, projective techniques and social artifacts. Visual method is useful when research deals with children who are not fully developed and able to comprehend text messages and also advantageous when investigating informants’ metaphorical thoughts about a subject or the content of their mind.

This paper examined how visual methods have assisted marketing and consumer researchers in achieving their goals and suggests when and how researchers can utilize the visual methods for future research.

The aim of this is to present a new combined, projective technique, the event‐based narrative inquiry technique (EBNIT), and analyze how it adds to traditional interviewing techniques in service development contexts for yielding new service ideas and evaluating current service.

The paper proposes and tests the new EBNIT technique in three service development projects in the information and communication technology field. The technique combines principles from the narrative inquiry technique and critical incident technique (CIT) as well as the use of projective elements in the form of metaphors.

Metaphors combined with lived critical and imaginary events helps to generate creative new service ideas. Customer experiences may be employed to interpret unspoken, tacit knowledge, which is beneficial when companies want to learn and create something new with the customer.

Metaphors are necessary in order to find truly new, customer‐oriented ideas. Through imaginary events, narratives are linked to lived experiences and make new ideas concrete and focused on issues that are relevant for customers in their daily lives in a broad context. In contrast to using solely CIT, narratives result in a dialogue that includes social and cultural aspects of events.

The narrative inquiry technique has not traditionally been used in service development. The paper suggests that when combined with the CIT and metaphors, narrative analysis becomes a manageable technique, which can be implemented in different service and product development settings.

This paper describes how a simple qualitative market research technique using a projective device called a bubble drawing can be used as a useful feedback device to gain an understanding of students' views of the teaching effectiveness of a market research lecture. Comparisons are made with feedback gained from teaching observations and insights drawn from this. Some areas for further research are suggested.