GRIN Verlag How collages reveal your deepest thoughts: A guide to consumers' minds

Thesis (M.A.) from the year 2010 in the subject Business economics - Offline Marketing and Online Marketing, grade: 1,0, University of Innsbruck (Institut für Strategisches Management, Marketing und Tourismus), language: English, abstract: A deeper understanding of how consumers think, feel and act is vital to the success of management and provides valuable information for managerial decision making in many areas of marketing. One key to this understanding is brand knowledge. Customer brand knowledge is the representation of a brand in consumers' minds. This thesis focuses on a visual-based view stating that brand knowledge is rather image-based as opposed to word-based. Unfortunately, a substantial amount of relevant knowledge within consumers' minds is unconscious and cannot be retrieved, accessed and recalled by customers. As a consequence, certain methods of retrieval are required, such as projective techniques. The method this thesis works with is the collage technique, an expressive projective method. This diploma thesis creates a multi-layered approach that facilitates the interpretation of collages without the need of any additional information given by the participants, based on metaphor analysis, color theory, a communication model and structural analysis. The thesis answers following research questions: - Is it possible to interpret collages without any additional information from respondents? - What information can be gained from this interpretation? - Are there any differences between the results of visual and verbal analysis?