Rather, for me, it opened the door to a new way of thinking about consumer understanding. The whole way we think about, and 'do', consumer understanding today stems from the early origins of marketing. Put starkly, our current approach to consumer understanding is a hangover from the past, designed to fit a peculiar set of historical conditions which have long since faded. A root and branch rethink of our current approach to understanding consumers is now needed. This rethink needs to embrace:

* the place of market research in modern business

* the type of understanding it seeks

Let us start by looking at place and purpose: they are intimately connected. Marketing lives and breathes two core functions: matching supply to demand, and connecting buyers and sellers as efficiently and effec

Many companies naturally see the middle, 'making' stage as the bit where wealth is actually created. But actually, if we look a little more closely at the process as a whole we soon discover that the matching and connecting functions of marketing are absolute, central economic necessities. Quite simply, if you fail to bring the right product or service to market, or fail to sell it, your survival is at risk. Making without matching and connecting is wasting. So the consumer understanding that informs this matching and connecting is the stuff of high stakes indeed.

In fact, once we step back to look at them in perspective, both the scientific approach to its object of study and the marketing approach to the consumer display exactly the same set of characteristics. They are both one way, subject-object, outside-looking-in, stimulus-response, theory then practice.

A supertanker environment, a God quest, push rather than pull, brand narcissism, a 'scientific' control-- oriented, subject-object approach. Put them together and some disturbing thoughts emerge. First, the way we talk consumer understanding makes it sound like a universally good thing. What company could not want to understand its customers better? Consumer understanding as we know it is not, however, a universal good but an ideology - a particular set of attitudes and actions which are designed for the special benefit of one particular group but dressed up in such a way that they seem like a universal benefit with no significant drawbacks or downsides.

tively as possible. Both these functions are critically dependent on consumer understanding at two very different stages of the wealth-creating process.

Some topics in this essay:
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