Process-Series Diagrams: 30 fully integrated diagrams for today’s visual learners, employing both color and shapes to depict the complete research process as well as specific research steps and stages in that process.

Behind the Scenes: Stories that researchers couldn’t or wouldn’t share with their name attached. These vignettes are perfect for discussion and are woven into the projects and the characters involved throughout the chapters. Although names and brands are withheld to protect the firm, this doesn’t mean the characters or story lines are any less real.

Snapshots: Mini-case studies, embedded within each chapter to entice the student to read about current marketing research. As a mini-case, each SNAPSHOT is designed for class discussion and specifically to concepts within the text of the chapter where it is located.

PicProfiles: Research stories with a memory visual. These may be about a controversy or about research driving an advertising campaign (like the one about Karastan and Andie MacDowell). In each case, the visual helps tell—and helps the student retain—the research story.

Pull Quotes: These are quick ideas, from noteworthy individuals—both contemporary and historical—that influence how we do research and how, as marketers, we interpret and use the research done by others. By their nature, they are the opinion of a single person, so many can be the foundation for argument or lively discussion.

Closeups: In-depth profiles of a current research practice or an expansion of a marketing research concept.

Cases: You’ll find stories from Ogilvy Research Award winners on children’s healthcare initiatives, you’ll learn about the American Heart Association’s first paid advertising campaign and the research behind it, as well as how the U.S. Tennis Association is revitalizing its sport and, in the process, conducting the largest research project ever related to sports. You’ll learn how State Farm conducts the study that identifies the most dangerous intersections in the United States and uses the data to improve our safety, and how Campbell-Ewald has uses research to measure the construct of respect. You’ll learn how one man with a vision can move airlines, as you follow the research being done by Open Doors Organization in its attempt to substantiate the growing economic power of travelers with disabilities, and how Net Conversions helps Kelley Blue Book design the most powerful automotive site on the web. You’ll learn how Wirthlin Worldwide helped the American Red Cross use research to revitalize donations, and how Starbucks, Bank One (now J.P Morgan Stanley), and Visa dreamed up a new financial product that won Business Week’s outstanding product honor. And you’ll learn how the low-carbohydrate diet craze inspired Donatos Pizza, and how Yahoo and ACNielsen moved web metrics a giant leap forward. These are research projects just completed, or in several instances, on-going. And you’ll only learn about them in this book.

End-of-Chapter Appendices: You’ll find two appendices following Chapter 5 offer hints on searching of bibliographic databases. Another offers in sights on doing research with children (Chapter 9). One offers information on various types of pretesting (Chapter 15), while another explores more complex experimental designs (Chapter 12) or advances to conjoint methodologies (Chapter 22). We’ve separated them so you can choose whether your students would benefit from this material.

Key terms in the margins: Help reinforce the definitions of key concepts.

Marginal reference notes: Refer students to something they read in a previous chapter that will help them grasp current material, something they are learning now that will help them understand subsequent material in a later chapter, or elaborate on a current concept to help make it stick in their mind.