“Before alone or (well) accompanied”? The Use of Projective Marketing Techniques

Abstract

Projective techniques, widely used in marketing research, encourage interviewees to talk about other people so that researchers can discover deep feelings and circumvent psychological prejudices. The present study analyzes empirical publications that involve the use of projective techniques in marketing. For this, two specific objectives were defined: to analyze if the publications are using only projective techniques or are being combined with other techniques and to identify which types of projective techniques are being used. The results were divided into bibliographic analysis and semantic analysis. In the first one, the evolution of the publications per year and the periodicals that most published articles using projective marketing research techniques, as Qualitative Market Research and the International Journal of Market Research, are presented. In the second, a qualitative analysis was performed, observing that half of the publications used only projective techniques while the other part combined with other data collection techniques such as interviews, focus groups, case studies and quantitative studies. The types of projective techniques more frequently employed were word association, sentence completion, Haire’s shopping list, thematic perception test, collages, drawings, scenarios, and third-person technique.