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This paper aims to address the gap in the extant literature examining the support offered to, and required by, students in light of the changing nature of the undergraduate dissertation and the changing nature of the student undertaking it. For many, it will be the first time that they will have undertaken a self‐directed, major research project. The focus of this paper is to present the neuro‐linguistic programming (NLP) framework for setting wellformed outcomes that was offered to students in the initial session of a pilot dissertation workshop support programme, initially targeting students completing dissertation projects on marketing topics within the Business School. Unlike modules on Research Methods the focus of this programme was not on methodology, but on soft skills such as goal setting, time management and motivation, along with practical skills such as those required to take advantage of developments in data processing technology. The paper also presents the findings of qualitative data gathered from responses of students in focus groups and in‐depth interviews designed to explore students’ on‐going motivation throughout the dissertation process. The paper concludes with a comparison of the results of those students who took part in the workshop sessions with those that did not.

In recent years there has been a welcome growth of interest in learning how artists understand, engage with and respond to aspects of business practice such as marketing. In the case of music it has been suggested that artists are by no means universally motivated by commercial success, and in many cases find the practices of mass marketing repellent. However, there is general agreement that the study of attitudes of artists is still in its infancy, not just in terms of identifying the research agenda, but just as pressingly in identifying a range of appropriate methodological tools for understanding the phenomenon. This paper aims to address these issues.

This paper describes a study where the focus was narrowed to a single genre (jazz), a single country (Poland) and a single artistic level (acts which have been successful both commercially and artistically). In total three biographical interviews were completed, involving four jazz musicians.

The research found many points of convergence with earlier studies, in particular the primacy of the artistic ideal over commercial imperatives. The evidence of this study, though, suggests that jazz musicians can engage with markets through a variety of different methods, which are heavily influenced by their desired and actual artistic identities.

This study sought to make a contribution to a growing area of research into musicians' identities outside the USA.

It is likely that deception in commerce has been evident since the growth of trading and the development of marketplaces in early history. But from the mid 20th century the tools and practices of marketing provided commentators new moral targets, in the dubious advertising and selling practices of modern corporations. But what is the morality of the process whereby consumers actively participate in deceiving themselves — in order, for example, to purchase and enjoy something they want but which they manifestly do not need? The term ‘seduction’ was applied to this type of deceptive transaction by Deighton and Grayson in a landmark paper in 1995. Yet despite the influence the work has had on the study of business ethics there has been surprisingly little testing of the concept. This paper seeks to address the imbalance between the conceptual development of the seduction concept and its empirical bases. Based on depth interviews describing recent purchasing decisions, subjects talked through their experiences and the impact they felt that marketing had on their behaviour. The research found evidence in several of the interviews of self‐deception and what has been described as seductive practice, and goes on to suggest an agenda for further study.

Proposes a prescriptive model for political marketing based loosely on the Six Markets Model of relationship marketing. The rationale for this is to be found in an analysis of the historical treatment of political marketing, from within both disciplines. Argues that many of the conventional axioms of marketing are inappropriate in politics, and observes how in political science, as in marketing itself, there is a questioning ofthe fundamental rational foundations of anumber of key theoretical constructs. In proposing a multiple markets model for politics, cites as evidence the fact that many of the approaches advocated appear already to have been adopted during the 1997 general election campaign of the British Labour Party.

While the area of project management maturity (PMM) is attracting an increased amount of research attention, the approaches to measuring maturity fit within existing social science conventions. This paper aims to examine the potential contribution of new data collection and analytical approaches to develop new insights in PMM.

This paper takes the form of a literature review.

The current trends of rapidly growing digital data collection and storage may have the potential to develop approaches to PMM assessment that overcome the limitations of existing qualitative and quantitative approaches.

Future research in PMM can employ techniques such as social network analysis and text analysis to develop insights based on the flow and content of information in organizations.

Adoption of data analytical approaches from big data can enable the creation of new types of holistic and adaptive maturity models. Holistic maturity models provide insights based on both structured and unstructured data within organizations. Adaptive maturity models provide rapid insights based on the flow of information within an enterprise.

The recent trend towards digitising of organizational knowledge and interactions has created the possibility to apply new analytical approaches and techniques to the understanding of PMM in firms. This paper identifies possible tools and approaches that can be applied to create new types of maturity models based on structured and unstructured data.

This paper aims to gain an understanding of the nature and extent of the practice of “public relations” in history.

The paper uses an analysis of popular narratives (in particular rumour, legend and myth) to inform a detailed case study of Glastonbury abbey in the medieval period.

Glastonbury Abbey worked in partnership with the Crown to develop a detailed promotional campaign based on powerful narratives. As a consequence it was able to grow to become one of the wealthiest communities in the country. The Crown, meanwhile, consolidated its position by being able to engender a whole national “brand” around the mythical corpus.

Methodologically, using folklore and other popular narrative material is useful as to an extent it is outside official control, but also provides information about the story tellers and the audiences.

The research builds on Watson's recent work on St Swithun and Winchester, taking the ideas forward several hundred years (and finding many of the same patterns). It finds new developments in terms of co‐branding and brand revivals.

The purpose of this paper is to make a contribution to knowledge by examining what happens to marketing in a time of toxic leadership, embodied in a corporate psychopath, in response to a call for marketers to seek a broader understanding of how marketing operates within organisations.

Commentators have suggested that concepts outside the usual marketing domain may aid in the gaining of an intra-organisational understanding of how marketing operates. Here, the concept of corporate psychopathy was used to identify a psychopathic UK board director and chief executive officer (CEO) via a constructivist approach to research involving six in-depth interviews. A CEO and a main board director who were measurably psychopathic were studied via these reports.

The paper examines how corporate psychopaths, as archetypal toxic leaders, are detrimental to marketing. Overseeing the marketing function within the UK part of an established and well-branded multi-national services company, corporate psychopaths capriciously dismantled the marketing initiatives that were in place and needlessly abandoned future marketing plans. Marketing services, marketing ethics, product quality and corporate reputation declined. Good marketers left.

The research demonstrates the dangers to marketing of toxic leadership. The paper also suggests that marketing may be uniquely qualified to deal with toxic leaders because it can, through research, identify them through their effects and behaviour. The results illustrate the value of longitudinal qualitative market research in investigating complex organisational situations.

The paper makes a unique contribution to the marketing field by empirically investigating, for the first time, the influence of a corporate psychopath director and a psychopathic CEO on the marketing function and practice. The research was conducted longitudinally using qualitative market research techniques via in-depth interviews over a two-year period. Longitudinal research aids in establishing causality, and this was evident in this research, as the negative influence of psychopathic leadership was monitored over time.

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.

The paper arose from an experienced qualitative market researcher's desire to challenge her working methodologies in analysing and interpreting data for commercial clients. Faced with tight deadlines, and working largely on her own, the researcher wished to consider if alternative working practices might be worth the necessary time investment and if outputs could actually be enhanced.

This paper compares the results of projective techniques of qualitative data collection analysed manually with computer‐aided analysis of the same data. Four focus groups were set up. Various creative and projective techniques were incorporated into the groups in order to explore and test the boundaries of both the manual and computer‐based analysis data to the full.

The organisation of data was aided by the use of CAQDAS file management structure, but a general overview of the results was somewhat lost to the researcher. Moreover, visual rather than textual data do not lend itself to computer‐aided analysis, minimising their utility in analysing results from a wide range of projective techniques.

While the objectivity of this introspective, reflective approach may be questionable, using a separate researcher to undertake different methods was neither deemed to enable a direct comparison of the process nor the experience, as seen reflectively through the eyes of the same researcher.

Insights can benefit other commercial market researchers who may be considering using CAQDAS.

The paper explores the analysis of data gathered using projective techniques – a recognised gap in the literature.