Sample Answer
Selected Journal and Articles
Article 1 (Quantitative research): “Quantitative and qualitative content analysis of marketing literature for innovative information systems: the Aldrich Archive” by Fass & Turner (2015), though about marketing literature, it uses quantitative content analysis; good as a quantitative‑method example.
Article 2 (Qualitative research): “A qualitative analysis of the marketing analytics literature: where would ethical issues and legality rank?” by Dar, Khan & Mujtaba (2021), explores marketing analytics via qualitative approach.
Article 3 (Literature review): “The Ebb and Flow of Brand Loyalty: A 28‑Year Bibliometric and Content Analysis” by Yazdi, Ramachandran, Mohsenifard, Nawaser, Sasani & Gharleghi (2024), a review study mapping decades of brand loyalty literature.
Summary of Article 1 — Fass & Turner (2015)
This study aims to explore how innovative information systems (IS) were marketed between 1980 and 1990, by analysing archival marketing materials. The main research question asks: what themes and claims appear persistently in marketing literature about IS during that decade, and how did marketers position IS in terms of benefit claims and persuasive strategies? The authors also ask whether marketing narratives emphasised technical features, monetary benefits, productivity claims, or broader organisational transformation.
To answer this, Fass and Turner use a quantitative content analysis combined with a qualitative follow‑up. The ‘content’ under study is a set of marketing brochures, adverts and technical marketing documents collected in the Aldrich Archive, a collection of materials produced for IT vendors between 1977 and 2000. For this paper they focus on documents from 1980–1990. The authors coded each document for a set of predefined categories: types of benefits claimed (e.g. information supply, cost savings, productivity gains), features emphasised (technical vs service), and persuasive frames (financial advantage, improved decision‑making, competitive advantage, future orientation). The coding allowed them to quantify how often each type of claim appeared across the sample.
The quantitative analysis reveals that the most common marketing emphasis was on information management or information supply: nearly half the documents made claims about better management of information flow and data centralisation. Claims about monetary or cost advantages (e.g. savings, efficiency, return on investment) appeared less frequently in the quantified coding results.
However, when the authors apply a qualitative content analysis to a sub‑sample of documents, reading the language, tone, metaphors and narratives, a different picture emerges. The qualitative reading shows that despite the lesser numeric frequency of explicit cost‑saving claims, many documents rely implicitly on economic benefit framing. For example, even adverts emphasising “information flow” often imply cost savings, labour reduction or competitive advantage. The recurring metaphor of “control through information” subtly links information management to financial and organisational efficiency.
The authors conclude that IS marketing in that era was not simply about selling technology for its own sake. Instead, the promotional literature blended a veneer of technical sophistication with implicit economic promises. The dual analysis shows that purely quantitative counts may under‑represent the real persuasive targets of marketing communication. In contrast, qualitative analysis reveals latent themes, especially economic benefit claims tied to broader organisational change.
The significance of this research lies in its methodological contribution: it demonstrates that combining quantitative and qualitative content analysis produces deeper and more nuanced insights than either method alone. For researchers in management or marketing, this hybrid approach offers a template for studying archival marketing materials, organisational communication, and historical shifts in business discourse. It also challenges the assumption that explicit mention equals importance: marketing claims may work through subtle implication as much as through overt statements.
Limitations acknowledged include the narrow time window (only one decade), the focus on one archive (Aldrich Archive), and the potential bias due to selective preservation of documents (some marketing materials may not have been archived). The authors also note that their coding categories were developed based on contemporary understanding of IS benefits, which might not fully capture how business decision‑makers in the 1980s understood or evaluated those benefits.
Overall, Fass and Turner’s article offers a clear example of how quantitative data can be enriched by qualitative interpretation, a lesson valuable for strategic management researchers, marketing historians, and communication scholars.
