Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to examine commonly relied upon product sampling strategies, direct‐to‐consumer sampling and event sampling, to determine which method can deliver the greatest return on investment in a variety of situations. Design/methodology/approach – The paper...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to investigate a new sampling methodology previously proposed for systems with a known lifetime distribution: the Predetermined Sampling Intervals (PSI) method. Design/methodology/approach – The methodology is defined on basis of system hazard...

Purpose – To develop an in‐pipe robot to be used for inspecting pipes that are laid underneath a waste disposal site and for sampling sewage water leaking from holes around the pipe. Design/methodology/approach – The paper presents a compact design of the robot's mechanical and electronic...

Product-harm crises are among a firm's worst nightmares. A firm may experience (i) a loss in baseline sales, (ii) a reduced own effectiveness for its marketing instruments, (iii) an increased cross sensitivity to rival firms' marketing-mix activities, and (iv) a decreased cross impact of its...

The internet is becoming a favored technology for carrying out survey research, and particularly sexual health research. However, its utility is limited by unresolved sampling questions such as how biased internet samples may be. This paper addresses this issue through comparison of a 'gold...

Much of the research conducted into young people's information seeking has taken place in schools. These organisations afford access to hundreds of diverse youngsters. They are accessible, and pupils are effectively pre‐classified for the researcher. Factors within a school that may affect...

The potential for segmenting and targeting consumers, using ethnicity as a segmenting variable, is widely recognised in the marketing literature. However, attention to the problems of identifying and reaching a single, often relatively small, ethnic group, as opposed to some aggregate of groups,...