The Consumer Insights Handbook

Danielle Sarver Coombs is professor in the School of Journalism and Mass Communication at Kent State University. She is the co-author of Female Fans of the NFL and author of Last Man Standing: Media, Framing, and the 2012 Republican Primary. Coombs has also co-edited three anthologiesDebates for the Digital Age, We Are What We Sell, and American History through American Sports (2012)and has published research on sport fans and fandom in journals, including the Howard Journal of Communications, Liminalities, the Journal of Sport & Social Issues, Sport in Society, International Journal of Sport Communication, and Public Relations Research.

Revised to Reflect the Reviewer Feedback Part I: Preparation Chapter 1: Introduction and Semester Overview This chapter orients students to the world of consumer insights research, offering important context to why this is important to learn, why this textbook was written, and connecting both of these to the field of applied consumer insights research. This will include basic information on how the ways we see the world influences our approaches to research, as well as more context for how multi-phase research is done in the field. Because students often do not realize how robust the field is for consumer insights researchers, this chapter also will highlight the career paths available. Within this structure, readers will learn about how teams work and learn some best practices for organizing and working with teams, based on specific feedback and suggestions from practitioners. This chapter will also address how media and strategic communication practitioners engage with research in their own positions, even if they are not specialized in the field. Finally, the differences between in-house, agency, and research boutiquesincluding titles, responsibilities, and reporting chainsare examined. The chapter will conclude with an overview of how the book is structured and how to best maximize value over the course of the semester. This is designed to help students draw connections to and plan for their own semester-long experiences, including tips on finding a client, managing expectations, recruiting and conducting research, final presentations, etc. Chapter 2: Working with your Client This chapter focuses on all of the pieces that go into ensuring your client (whether an external partner or internal team) and you are on the same page. This will include responding to requests for proposals (RFPs), helping understand and assess needs, establishing and working with budgets, understanding business objectives and research objectives (and how they are linked), and developing actionable research questions. Chapter 3: Secondary Analysis Projects often should start with a secondary analysis of available information, whether from public or private sources. In this chapters, students will learn about a range of tools that they can access (U.S. Census, publicly available datasets) as well as strategies for conducting assessments of media coverage and in-house materials. Chapter 4: Ethics Perhaps the most important chapter in the entire book, this chapter explores the ethics of human subject research. Examples of past failures will be explored and best practices will be introduced and explained, including brief discussions of new and emerging privacy laws and controversies over collection and use of data from vulnerable populations (such as children). As is the case throughout the book, this will have an explicitly applied focus, looking at situations that might come up when conducting consumer insights research and encouraging students to think through how to deal with them. Part II: Qualitative Research Chapter 5: Research Design and Considerations In this chapter, students are introduced to the various methods of data collection in qualitative research, both face-to-face (primarily interviews, ethnographies, participant observation, and focus groups) and online (online communities, digital ethnographies, etc.). The strengths and weaknesses of each method are examined as well as advice on how to design the best possible research project while balancing your objectives with available resources (time and money). Finally, we will discuss how you ensure rigor in qualitative research. Chapter 6: Qualitative Data Collection While students are exposed to qualitative methods in the previous chapter, this chapter on data collection is focused on how you do these. How do you write an effective instrument? How do you prepare? What techniques can you employ to ensure you are getting good, quality data? What sorts of innovations are hap