Editorial

Citation

Lindridge, A. (2014), "Editorial", Qualitative Market Research, Vol. 17 No. 1. https://doi.org/10.1108/QMR-10-2013-0077

Editorial

Article Type: Editorial From: Qualitative Market Research: An International Journal, Volume 17, Issue 1

I would first like to say a warm welcome to my first issue as the new editor for Qualitative Market Research. Having being trusted and guided into the role by Professor Len Tiu Wright, I feel that we now enter a new phrase in the growth of our journal, Qualitative Market Research. Over the coming volumes and issues I will aim to continue to provide a stream of articles that challenge and interest us, whilst encouraging greater reflection in our roles as marketing academics and practioners. At the same time I want to reach out to academics around the world and encourage them to submit their papers to us, as we aim to broaden our reach and reputation as a cutting edge research journal.

In our first paper from Indonesia, the author Meidiahna Kusuma explores the sensitive topic of socio-sexuality and product adaption decisions on editorial images and advertisements in Playboy magazine. Using content analysis, drawn from four culturally diverse countries, the author suggests that socio-sexuality is positively correlated to the degree of nudity in photographs and to the usage of advertising for controversial products. This understanding contributes then to our understanding of the wider socio-cultural factors that influence the international marketing of controversial products and how product adaption can be encouraged amongst more liberal target groups.

The issue of beauty and how it is determined is developed in our next paper by the authors Katherine Annette Burnsed and Nancy J. Hodges. Using a sample group from the Southeast region of the USA, the authors investigate consumer’s perceived value regarding home furnishings. In particular within consumer decisions to purchase wooden compared to upholstered furniture. Using semi-structured interviews and a focus group, the authors provide interesting insights into consumers’ motivations for household furniture purchases. Like the previous paper, the authors argue that such decisions are not solely based upon how society expects us as consumers to consume (in this paper, how other people view your furnishings choice) but how as consumers we determine for ourselves what we purchase.

Concepts of beauty infer a wider sense of market mediation between suppliers and customers meeting in a market place, where discourses surrounding power are negotiated. These issues are developed further in our fourth paper, where issues of competition amongst suppliers matched with customers’ needs for a relationship presents a paradoxical tension. Using a case-study methodology, the author Sylvie M. Lacoste, from France, investigates supplier-customer relationships within the context of industrial cable manufacturing. The author’s contribution lies in indicating that in such business to business relationships, suppliers should prepare themselves for co-opetitive tensions. Indeed, one of the interesting contributions of this paper is the recognition that suppliers who are informed of being granted preferred supplier status should not view this as indicative of being less pressured to reduce their prices.

Moving away from the commercial market, our next two papers focus on the not-for-profit sector. The author Roger Bennett, in his paper develops our understanding of marketing awareness within this sector. In particular, the authors uses the context of British Government financial cuts to explore how small charities who do not possess marketing backgrounds use marketing (or otherwise) to address funding cuts. These themes are explored through interviews with 26 small non-profit contemporary dance companies. The contribution from this paper lies in the identification of management confusion regarding what constitutes marketing and a wider need for greater marketing awareness in arts teaching and management.

In our final paper from India, the themes of supplier-customer relationships are developed by the author Ardhendu Shekhar Singh. Continuing our perspective of the not-for-profit section, the author takes a practioner perspective to encourage us to understand how to explore supplier-customer relationships research, specifically focussing on the handicraft charity sector in India. This paper explores then a number of key methodological considerations required when undertaking case-study research in the not-for-profit sector.

Andrew Lindridge