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Article Excerpt
This paper advocates a change in how the research industry understands the consumer. The prevailing empiricist approach to the management sciences should be abandoned and consumer markets would better be regarded as complex adaptive systems. The paper concludes by providing suggestions for developing future thinking on this topic. This paper was joint winner of the Best New Thinking award at the 2003 Market Research Society conference.
Introduction
Advertising has not yet found its Newton.
(Lord Saatchi 2002)
Leaving aside the delusions of grandeur, if that's really what we are looking for, this paper suggests that we are looking in the wrong place and for the wrong thing. The purpose of this paper is to argue that it is time to re-examine the fundamental assumptions that underpin our understanding about how the consumer 'works', and in doing so will:
* Demonstrate the shortcomings of our Newtonian assumptions.
* Show how the natural sciences have moved on from this model.
* Taking just three examples from complex adaptive systems thinking, demonstrate a radically different perspective and illustrate some of the implications for our business.
* Try to provide some practical pointers for new approaches in market research and analysis.
* And lastly show that, despite all this, there is no need to panic.
I do not propose to provide answers. The intent is to offer a view, a direction we had not considered before, into areas of discovery perhaps not previously imagined. Areas that could prove more productive to the research community in being better equipped and better able to offer our paymasters the answers they seek.
Besides, to be equally pompous, it was Kant who said that the 'Newton for explaining a blade of grass could never be found'.
Newton, natural sciences, and the shortcomings of our assumptions
Arguably the founder of the scientific tradition in the age of the empiricists, Newton was really the first of the natural philosophers to perfect and apply the analytic method. In simple terms, the method of breaking a problem into components, studying each part in isolation, drawing conclusions about the whole and then testing those conclusions by experiment. It quickly became a pervasive tradition. The strength of this approach - testing our power to think against nature itself - lies in its endurance. Einstein was as subject to the rigours of experiment and testing as any alchemist. In the empiricist tradition the notion of a thought being subject to natural verification through experiment became formally known as corroboration (Popper) and it is the guardian of validity.
If there is exception to any rule ... that rule is wrong.
(Feynman 1998)
This empiricist analytic approach was to hold three advantages: simplicity, efficiency and predictability. But, there were consequences. At a fundamental level in both philosophy and science the dominance of reductionism removed considerations of time, context, cause, and ultimately, change.
However, that was over 200 years ago. Mechanical explanations are as dead as Newton. Both management science, and many branches of social sciences, have so far been slow to notice that the cornerstones of this method - the natural sciences - have quietly moved away from this purely mechanistic approach. Which is not to say that they have abandoned the scientific method - only its rigid, mechanistic, reductionist philosophy: 'The idea of science as absolute truth has gone the way of the dodo' (Stewart & Cohen 1997). The natural sciences have moved on. It's about time research and data analysis caught up.
Our Newtonian assumption
The great prize offered by the analytic method is predictability. If you know the state or conditions of an object at a given time then you can accurately predict its state or condition at any given time. We apply exactly this same paradigm to how we go about understanding 'the consumer' and the business of advertising to them. These are the very bones on which we practise our alchemy. We break the market into its component parts. We see how they work by describing them. We then draw conclusions about the whole. This is the method we employ to understand the state or condition of the object of our desire - the consumer. Gordon & Valentine illustrate one of the critical shortcomings of this approach extremely clearly in their paper 'The 21st Century Consumer'. They make a clear argument for the inadequacy of all the variants that our current model of thinking about the consumer has spawned: statistical, secretive, sophisticated, satellite, and multi-headed. Each takes a different slant in trying to provide a f ull and adequate description of the state of the consumer. Approaches in all of which:
We subscribe to a taken-for-granted idea of 'the consumer' as a kind of Barbie doll.
(Gordon & Valentine 2000)
A Barbie doll that, once fully described, was supposed to provide us with the information required to make accurate predictions of behaviours, preferences, dispositions and purchases. It's why we research and it's why we analyse.
It was always a deeply unsatisfactory model.
(Bullmore 2003)
But why should we question it? Simply because the pursuit of understanding our markets--the consumer--in using mechanistic natural sciences terms has failed. It has not failed through lack of information, intellect, or application. It has failed because the question was wrong. The question assumed that there would be a linear, mechanical, and deterministic answer. The question assumed that we could predict.
In the past we dealt with a system that operated in a restricted environment, where production was relatively slow, distribution localised, choice limited, prices were controlled, and disposable wealth more meagre. Within that context a mechanical set of system assumptions was perfectly adequate and historically is demonstrably so. However, once these can be demonstrated to no longer work there is a requirement to re-examine the underlying assumptions on which they rest.
The research and analysis business now has to operate in a world that is smaller, faster, richer and more adaptable than ever before--and we are fighting to keep up. There is a myriad of 'evidence' of a world that indeed is smaller, faster, richer and more adaptable than ever before--from Gleick's account of the changing pace of our lives, Soros' disquiet at the lack of adaptive political structures, to Klein's account of the spread of consumer activism. Such evidence is summarised by Earls' (2002) tsunami idea in Welcome to the Creative Age, in which he describes four key factors that indicate the overwhelming tide of change.
Oversupply--the consumer is offered too much of...
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