Abstract
Having access to the thoughts of consumers and managers and being able to represent these makes up a large part of the work involved in marketing. However, the majority of methods used to accomplish these tasks entail a significant limitation. These methods do not allow the relationships between cognitive elements to be clearly represented. This limitation in turn prevents researchers from being able to represent the lines of reasoning developed by their subjects. Cognitive maps, little known in marketing, can provide a solution to this problem Cognitive mapping is a methodological tool which enables to understand the mental representations of a person at a particular moment. With marketing striving to understand managers’ strategic decisions as much as consumers’ choices, it seems surprising to note the lack of studies which utilize the methodological tool of cognitive mapping (Jones and Eden, 1981; Durif and Perrien, 2008) to gain an understanding of mental representations. Yet, cognitive mapping may be able to provide solutions for an extremely wide range of important issues in marketing: what image can be constructed around a product in accordance with consumers’ mental designs? What place does the consumer hold in marketers’ decision making processes? In what respect does an innovation have a chance of establishing itself, taking consumers’ mental representations into account?
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© 2015 Academy of Marketing Science
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Chaney, D. (2015). Analyzing Mental Representations in Marketing: the Contribution of Cognitive Mapping. In: Dato-on, M. (eds) The Sustainable Global Marketplace. Developments in Marketing Science: Proceedings of the Academy of Marketing Science. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-10873-5_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-10873-5_1
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Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
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Online ISBN: 978-3-319-10873-5
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