The Consumer Insights Handbook

At its core, consumer insights research is fun. Fast-paced, creative, and exciting, working in this field means constant interaction and engagement with people, concepts, and ideas. Consumer insights researchers get to spend their days partnering with clients to solve complex and knotty problems across all mass communication industries, including film, television, digital, advertising, and public relations. They do deep dives to understand the perceptions and perspectives of target audiences using a wide range of approaches and methods. On every project, hours are spent playing with data and ideas, coming up with creative and innovative ways to approach problems and uncover the insights that will lead to effective audience engagement. This work is dynamic and intellectually challenging, celebrating innovative approaches that lead to unique explanations of—and solutions for—important problems. It also is essential to success: Whether you are working on a media product or a strategic communication campaign, successfully reaching your audience and meeting your objectives requires good research.

Unfortunately, this is not what our undergraduate students currently experience when using the existing crop of research methods textbooks. Even though journalism, media, applied communication, advertising, and public relations programs typically offer—and often require—at least a foundational research methods course, most undergraduate students do not leave those courses with an accurate understanding of what this field actually entails. Typically written with an emphasis on academic research, those books often are intended for those who plan to follow a very specific path—conduct scholarly research, primarily using quantitative methods. The scientific method dominates this perspective, and students are taught to prioritize the concepts and conditions central to academic research. While useful for those who are interested in continuing for graduate degrees, these textbooks do not adequately represent the world of—or prepare students for—the realities of consumer insights research. This book represents a much-needed alternative.

This textbook flips the typical model presented in mass communication research textbooks. In these books, audiences often are primarily framed almost exclusively as participants—presented as a means to generate data. Instead, as students will learn through this text, data should be used to understand people as thoughtful, deliberative audiences. As such, research should be done with the goal of better understanding target audiences in a meaningful way. With this orientation...