Allgemeine Inhalte / Course Description
Inhalt der Veranstaltung / Course description
With the rise of digitization, consumers, directly and indirectly, interact with businesses. Smart phone usage enables easy and fast generation, sharing, diffusion and purchasing of contents among people and is changing the business landscape. While the online & mobile purchase behaviour was until now the focus of researchers, only few research uncovered consumer’s attitudes using mobile research approaches.
The software app “Ask your Brain” developed at UHH opens up a radically new possibility for conducting context-specific market research: Retrieving implicit consumer cognitions “on the fly”, i.e. outside of laboratory settings but where people are and in specific situations, being at-home, at work or in e.g. a fitness studio.
Consumer’s attitudes are based on implicit cognition and can also be context-dependent. While I might like “dogs” in general, I tend to avoid them while jogging. Positive stimuli might produce immediate approach tendencies and negative stimuli might produce instant avoidance action tendencies, depending upon the situation. For example, popcorn provokes eating while being in a movie but not while sitting in a lecture. Such implicit associations or automatic action tendencies occur regardless of whether we consider them true or false. In this seminar, we want to assess such situation-specific behaviour by mobile market research.
To go beyond traditional surveys, Ask your Brain (AYB) software/App was developed at UHH. Several experimental settings can uncover consumer’s unconscious attitudes, which reflect consumers‘ real preferences, but may not be noticed or hidden by the consumers. The Implicit Association Test (IAT) measures automatic concept-attribute associations. In addition, the Approach-Avoidance Task (AAT) is based on the finding that stimulus’ emotion is related to our psychological element of approach and avoidance.
Lernziel / learning outcomes::
The seminar allows students to experience a real-life consumer research project using Ask your Brain (AYB) software/App. Students will be provided with essential guidance on how to use the AYB software/App during the seminar. State-of-the-art measurement instruments will be used to measure consumers´ cognitions (i.e., implicit association test from Harvard University). As we work empirically, the seminar is bound to be time-consuming, demanding and challenging. However, it enables students to participate in cutting-edge market research paving the way for Bachelor theses. Different environments – being at home, at work or at social events – as well as time aspects – in the morning, during day or in the evening – impact our thoughts and feelings, thus, we want to explore implicit cognitions using IAT measures to explore following topics:
1. Healthy Food: tasty or nasty? <depending on location: e.g. at home/ at fitness studio>
2. Fear of crime: feeling safe or unsafe <depending on time of day>
3. Robots: Friend or Enemy? <depending upon private or working context>
4. Bitcoin et al: Currency or Gambling money?
5. Trust: in companies or in states?
6. Other topics related to consumer behaviour are welcomed!!!
Due to empirical nature of the seminar, it is expected that students are equipped with basic knowledge of data analysis strategies (e.g., descriptive statistics, ANOVA) and primary understanding of statistical software such as STATA. However, students will be provided with required guidance on data coding and analysis during the seminar. Following a mandatory organisational kickoff, the seminar will be held two-weekly.
Vorgehen / Structure:
Students will outline the theoretical basis during the second block of the seminar by a short presentation of literature synopsis and their experiment set up. Following the third block, students start their data collection followed by data coding and analysis (under supervision). In block 4, students will discuss empirical findings & develop sketches for their seminar papers (abstract & table of contents). Students need to submit their written report for the seminar until March 1th 2022.
Es steht Ihnen frei in englischer oder deutscher Sprache zu präsentieren und zu schreiben. Wir empfehlen dieses Seminar auf Englisch zu absolvieren, um besser auf die Berufswelt vorbereitet zu sein, wo Englisch gängiger Standard ist. In diesem Seminar wird explizit nicht der Umgang mit der Sprache bewertet, sondern lediglich die Inhalte. Dieses Seminar bietet neben seinen spannenden inhaltlichen Themen somit auch die Möglichkeit, sich besser auf die berufliche Praxis vorzubereiten. Aus der Teilnahme auf Englisch wird Ihnen kein Nachteil entstehen.
Literatur / Literature:
For further information about the “Ask your Brain (AYB)” software (both browser-based version as well as smartphone version), please download the app or inspect the features described on our homepage (shortcut: askyourbrain.org). Here, you can play some exemplary “games” to get the “touch and feel” of our research approach.
In addition, you might want to read our method article about implicit cognition measures:
Teichert, T., Graf, A., Rezaei, S., Wörfel, P., & Duh, H. (2019). Measures of Implicit Cognition for Marketing Research. Marketing ZFP, 41(3), 48–76 <free download!>
Zusätzliche Hinweise zu Prüfungen / Additional information regarding the examination:
Passing the seminar requires the following:
· Presentation on own research idea (block 2)
· Execution of empirical research project (block 3)
· Discussion of findings (block 4)
· Written report on the own empirical study
Each part has to be passed with at least a 4.0 in order to pass this course.