Current Issue Summary
June 2023 (Vol. 64, Issue 2)

The Stories You Tell: Crafting Managerially Relevant Articles Based on Qualitative Research
Many researchers struggle with developing and writing about their work in a way that is relevant to the practices of advertising and marketing. Researchers Melissa Archpru Akaka (University of Denver) and Hope Jensen Schau (University of Arizona) offer a process—a toolkit of sorts—for crafting qualitative research that is both accessible to industry readers and impactful on practice.

Advertising and marketing practitioners leverage big data to track and influence consumer behaviors, analyze messages and perfect customer engagement through digital platforms. Often these data do not capture the complexity of market contexts or address questions about how or why specific behaviors occur. This article “provides a pathway for unpacking insights from deep data in ways that inform marketing strategy,” Akaka and Schau write. It calls for the “use of qualitative research to organize chaos, capture lived experiences and investigate diffusion of social practices.” Moreover, the researchers “demonstrate how to use qualitative methods through a practitioner-oriented, systematic sensemaking process.” Among the takeaways:

• “The proposed systematic sensemaking approach draws on qualitative methods to derive deep insights into lived market experiences, including consumption journeys, market-oriented collectives and practice diffusion and adaptation.
• “Qualitative research provides in-depth explanations that can reduce uncertainty in emergent and evolving advertising contexts and help develop new marketing strategies and theories.”

Read the full article here.