Perspectives on projective techniques in consumer research: a review, primary analysis, and methodological guidance

Abstract Projective techniques are methods that use abstract stimuli to help gain deeper insights, beliefs, and associations from respondents than can be gained by traditional survey research. The area of projective techniques is broad, ranging from relatively simple tasks such as word association and sentence completion to more elaborate tasks such as creative writing, collage creation, and physical model construction. We conduct a semi-systematic literature review on projective techniques in the consumer research areas of marketing, hospitality & tourism, and food & nutrition, with a specific focus on the interplay of qualitative and quantitative methods used to analyze projective technique data. To gain further insight into these methods, we analyze primary data from a study on city tourist destinations using word association and sentence completion projective techniques. The findings reveal continued relevance of projective methods, particularly for diagnosing a destination's image and brand personality, unearthing brand symbolism, and identifying unspoken consumer anxieties and desires. This research synthesizes how qualitative and quantitative approaches to projective technique data can be selected and combined, offers a practice-grounded inventory of the analytic methods used across the literature, and shows how these techniques generate diagnostically useful consumer insights without sacrificing interpretive depth.