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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?

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.

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.

The purpose of this paper is to draw on a subjective personal introspection (SPI) approach and Breakwell’s identity process theory (IPT) principles to show how elements from different cultures are performed by an individual to form a unique patchwork identity, and how this patchwork identity will contribute to deepen tourist gaze and, thus, achieving and maintaining authentic destination experience.

The use of SPI gives the researcher an easy access to data collection of his personal, daily experiences related to changing destinations and consuming different places in Europe (France, UK and Italy), North America (USA and Canada) and North Africa (Algeria, Morocco and Egypt) for unlimited 24-hour access from an insider’s ongoing lived experiences.

The results show that Breakwell’s IPT four principles are an integral part of patchwork identity construction when living and experiencing several places. Patchwork identity encompasses the individual’s ability to cross different social and symbolic boundaries when experiencing different destination. Each cultural context contributes to the bricolage and the assemblage of individual patchwork identity revealing one or more IPT dimensions.

This paper serves to emphasize the importance of SPI-based research to patchwork identity construction in understanding the impact of cultural identity on tourist gaze. This approach can help marketers and tourism professionals to understand how consumers select the cultural elements that fit their identity and how the patchwork identity formed will contribute to deepen tourist gaze and destination experience of authenticity.

The use of IPT and SPI-based research to explore tourist gaze offers a comprehensive framework based on a personal introspective approach where the starting point is the meaning individual provides to his hyphenated identity as coping mechanism to respond to social, psychological, ideological, cultural, symbolic, functional, structural, etc., aspirations.

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 research uses interpretive phenomenology to investigate the effect of visitor–destination interactions and image formation. It seeks to understand the processes that lead the visitor to make sense of his destination experience for her/himself and to others, and transmit that image through his story. A subjective personal introspective SPI and longitudinal observation have been used to collect data and acquire an insider perspective on the image of France as a place experienced by an Asian researcher who is living, experiencing, working, visiting, and traveling in France. The results of this research tend to move the understanding of destination image formation forward by taking a holistic approach that allows researching personal image perception and construction from genuine insider perspective as it is qualified by the individual within his own experiences. The main contribution of this research is to show how the image of a destination might evolve from a tourism destination to a mundane consumption place. This idea emphasizes the transformation of a tourist to a nontourist consumption place.

This paper aims to demonstrate deep gaze using a Japanese Shinto wedding ceremony as an example. Some long-term tourists develop an intimate understanding of the host country’s culture by gaining access to authentic experiences typically limited to the locals. These native visitors experience a deep gaze.

Combing subjective personal introspection (SPI) and confirmatory personal introspection (CPI), the author’s 76 wedding photographs are examined critically.

Results demonstrate how a native visitor uses SPI and CPI analyses of native gaze. While the Shinto wedding ceremony’s authenticity mixes traditional and evolutionary elements, the ceremony is best viewed as a Gestalt experience. The evidence suggests authenticity need not have deep roots in the culture.

The findings serve as only one configuration of many possible gazes. Tourist Gaze 4.0 is a set of complex antecedent conditions and multiple configurations.

Using photographs taken by native family members, this paper demonstrates how SPI and CPI identify deep gaze through a different lens.

Some consumption activities are inherently interesting, pleasurable, gratifying and potentially important to consumers' lives. The primary aim of this paper is to further understanding of the role pleasurable consumption plays in consumers' lives.

To explore consumer value in pleasurable consumption experiences, the consumer value typology in conjunction with the subjective personal introspection (SPI) approach, is applied to experiences captured in travel photographs.

Analysis identifies all eight consumer value types with play, aesthetics and, surprisingly, spirituality the most evident. Pleasure is shown as much more than immediate, self‐gratification. Issues of competency, both active effort and appreciation of others' abilities, individual growth and development as well as sharing and feelings of relatedness are all important components of pleasure.

The use of consumer value as a conceptual framework in combination with a reflective tool such as SPI suggests not only alternative approaches for future research into pleasurable consumption, but also indicates some innovative strategies to put into practice.

Communicating the different value types prior to consumption and incorporating active reflection, possibly could assist in improving consumers' enjoyment of their experiences which, in turn, could reduce post‐purchase dissonance. Besides being used as a promotional tool to increase customer satisfaction, the consumer value framework could facilitate product bundling and possibly expand product benefits.

The paper illustrates the multidimensional nature of pleasure through two research methods infrequently used, SPI and the photo essay, positioning both as valuable tools for exploring and enhancing pleasurable consumption.

This paper describes the personal history and intellectual development of Morris B. Holbrook (MBH), a participant in the field of marketing academics in general and consumer research in particular.

The paper pursues an approach characterized by historical autoethnographic subjective personal introspection or HASPI.

The paper reports the personal history of MBH and – via HASPI – interprets various aspects of key participants and major themes that emerged over the course of his career.

The main implication is that every scholar in the field of marketing pursues a different light, follows a unique path, plays by idiosyncratic rules, and deserves individual attention, consideration, and respect … like a cat that carries its own leash.

In the case of MBH, like (say) a jazz musician, whatever value he might have depends on his originality.