MRS Silver Medal
The Silver Medal is awarded to the best paper published in the International Journal of Market Research in the preceding calendar year.
For the 2009 award, nine were taken to the second stage and two were judged to be exceptional - but of course there can only be one winner.
Winner:
John Cromie & Michael Ewing for their paper:
Squatting at the digital camp fire; reflections on researching the Open Source Community
(published in IJMR Vol 50, No. 5)
What the judges said:
This paper describes an investigation into the nature of the Open Source community in particular looking for shared values. An initial finding from the first stage of the enquiry showed that the community only felt happy taking to the ‘converted’, so a basic website was established in line with their expectations, to explain to potential recruits the purpose of the research and the credentials of the organisers . Following an initial ‘seeding’, an appropriate community started to grow using a cascade principle but with the basic ‘demographic’ of the community watched to ensure that there was a diversity of types of Open Source people included within it. The community could then get on with discussing the themes using a closed e mail list (which in effect excluded people not ‘in the know’) and offered up the ‘digital camp fire’ around which they gathered for an exchange of ideas.
What particularly impressed was the openness of the practical details given, the range of methods brought into play - including the creation of the camp fire, the ambitious nature of the task and the significance for research into difficult communities.
Finalists:
Geoff Wicken & Richard Asquith for their paper:
Turning the amplification up to 11
(published in IJMR Vol 50, No. 6)
What the judges said:
This paper has approached the issue of quantifying the effects of different types of people on changing advertising reach and frequency. The route was to classify respondents into the categories described in Malcom Gladwell’s book, The Tipping Point. By adding a small number of questions to the TGI, respondents were put into the categories for a number of product sectors. Some sectors had a higher proportion of advocates than others.
Media also varied by the proportional presence of the different groups for the various product categories, meaning that some media had more advocates than others suggesting that advertising placed in them would have a greater associated word of mouth and reach more people more times: this is where the idea of ‘amplification’ comes from.
A number of quantitative assumptions were made to illustrate the point and demonstrated that it will be possible to change the way media plans are designed.
The judges were impressed by the clarity of the writing and the intrinsic simplicity of the idea
2009 Awards to be presented
|
