Kiro

Soon, voice assistants might be able to engage in fully-fledged social conversations with people, rather than merely providing a voice-operated interface to functionality and data. So far, not much is known about designing such "social" voice assistants and the potential social experiences, which could and should emerge in everyday situations. In the present paper, we created a design fiction to explore a sophisticated social voice assistant in the context of the car. Based on models from psychology and psychotherapy, we designed the fictional "virtual passenger" Kiro. We created a website for Kiro (http://www.heykiro.com/), distributed it, and collected responses in various ways (e.g., comments). We further ran a market research-type focus group. In general, we found people to accept Kiro as a conversation partner but not as a replacement for human-human conversations. We suggest designing social voice assistants in a way to enable novel types of socially fulfilling, yet distinct human-machine conversations.

Anchors on prices of consumer goods only hold when decisions are hypothetical

We elicit willingness to pay for different types of consumption goods, systematically manipulating irrelevant anchors (high vs. low) and incentives to provide true valuations (hypothetical questions vs. Becker-DeGroot-Marschak mechanism). On top of a strong hypothetical bias, we find that anchors only make a substantial, significant difference in the case of hypothetical data, the first experiments to directly document such an interaction. This finding suggests that hypothetical market research methods may deliver lower quality data. Moreover, it contributes to the discussion examining the mechanism underlying the anchoring effect, suggesting it could partly be caused by insufficient conscious effort to drift away from the anchor.

Affective Computing in Marketing: Practical Implications and Research Opportunities Afforded by Emotionally Intelligent Machines

After years of using AI to perform cognitive tasks, marketing practitioners can now use it to perform tasks that require emotional intelligence. This advancement is made possible by the rise of affective computing, which develops AI and machines capable of detecting and responding to human emotions. From market research, to customer service, to product innovation, the practice of marketing will likely be transformed by the rise of affective computing, as preliminary evidence from the field suggests. In this Idea Corner, we discuss this transformation and identify the research opportunities that it offers.

ENGLISH FOR MARKET RESEARCH REPORT WRITING: COURSE DESIGN

At undergraduate and postgraduate levels in business schools, lecturers often provide students with a suggested structure for a market research report assignment. Thereafter, the students are left to independently master the appropriate register and the technique of writing for this genre. While many students may learn to be good at business studies, they might fall short in writing despite having to produce several reports at university level. One of the reasons for this shortfall may be that some of the students may lack the confidence to produce reports which meet academic or professional standards in the English language. A short English for Specific Purposes (ESP) course that addresses the technical writing needs of business students as an option or add-on course to undergraduate and postgraduate business curricula could provide the simple solution. It could even be formalised as a credit bearing course to motivate students to undertake it.With a view to the above, as a pilot ESP module, a 15-hour English for Market Research Report Writing Skills course was designed to try and meet the specific needs of undergraduate market research students at the Warwick Business School (WBS). It was intended to be taught under the auspices of the Warwick Skills Certificate Programme at the University of Warwick in the United Kingdom (UK).

Czech companies will have to deal with import of labour

Labour market or supply and demand for labour is determined by how individuals demand work (supply) and how the offer of jobs is from the side of companies (demand). This is a very important issue, as it is a part of the main factor markets. The data on labour market are used for analysing the movement of labour market. Thanks to this, it is possible to forecast its approximate development. The basic source are data from the database of the Ministry of Labour and Social Affairs of the Czech Republic. The objective of this paper is to analyse the development of supply and demand for labour in the years 2010-2020 and forecast its development until 2025. The analysis of time series is performed using the method of artificial neural networks, which enables the analysis of the development between 2010 and 2020 and forecasting the further development of supply and demand for labour until the year 2025. The research shows that the development until the year 2025 will not be very favourable. The demand will be much greater than the supply, which means there will be more vacancies than workers. To fill the vacancies and be able to further operate, companies will try to solve this situation by hiring workers from other countries. The results of the paper being submitted may serve for other labour market research.

Event marketing and strategy

The term ‘event marketing’ has been used in a range of different ways and given a range of different meanings. While all of these meanings may be appropriate in various contexts, the term utilized in this chapter refers to that part of the event management process that involves the marketing of events and hence, to the market research, promotion and advertising that aims at increasing the number of customers that pay to attend the event. The American Marketing Association defines marketing as “the set of activities, institutions, and processes for creating, communicating, delivering and exchanging offerings that have value for customers, clients, partners, and society at large” (www.ama.org). In this vein, event marketing includes the activities, tactics and tools used to communicate and promote the value of events to prospective attendees.

NUTRITIONAL STATUS IDENTIFICATION AND EATING HABITS OF A REPRESENTATIVE GROUP OF PREGNANT WOMEN

There are special nutritional requirements in pregnancy, in which the intake of nutrients exerts its action both on the woman and the conception product. Therefore, the balance and diversity are the key of a proper nutrition during the pregnancy. Combining food categories is the best way to ensure nutritional balance during pregnancy period. A market research was performed on a representative sample at national level of 120 persons, in order to identify the nutritional status of pregnant women in this group. The market research highlighted the diet structure of the studied group, the categories of foods consumed weekly by the group members, as well as their frequency of consumption. The results of the study indicated a varied diet of pregnant women, but the frequency of consumption should be reviewed for certain food categories, thus: increased for: milk and dairy products, fish, oily fruits; lower, in fatty foods and salt.

Toward a Pedagogy for Consumer Anthropology: Method, Theory, Marketing

This paper focuses on teaching the application of anthropology in business to marketing students. It begins with the premise that consumer marketers have long used ethnography as a component of their qualitative market research toolkit to inform their knowledge about and empathy for consumers. A question for market research educators who include ethnography in their curricula is if and how to teach the richness of anthropologically based approaches, especially given a decoupling of ethnographic method from anthropological theory in much consumer research practice. This discussion might also resonate with anthropology educators who are interested in the ways anthropology is applied in commercial settings. As a demonstration of a teaching mode rather than a research report, this paper describes how a consumer anthropology market research project is used experientially in the classroom to help marketing students learn and appreciate the application of both anthropological method and theory for brand-building. Included is a summary of an ethnographic project on Duncan Hines cake mix and an in-class student exercise during which three conceptual ‘jumping off’ points from anthropological theory were used to generate marketing initiatives.