Do you really understand your customers?

            'We've given up trying to understand our customers and it's cut a lot of cost and complexity from our business'. For me, this rather flippant remark over lunch, from a board director of one of the UK's most successful retailers, was something of an epiphany. No, this was not a blockheaded statement of deliberate ignorance - a prelude to certain commercial disaster. .
             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 .
             * its purpose .
             * the type of understanding it seeks .
             * its approach to the consumer. .
             STEERING THE SUPERTANKER .
             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 effectively as possible. Both these functions are critically dependent on consumer understanding at two very different stages of the wealth-creating process. .
             At the very beginning of the process, some element of consumer understanding is crucial to divining what consumers want. At this stage, consumer understanding drives (or at least, informs) research and development (R&D) and new product development. At the next stage, ,making', consumer understanding per se fades into the background, as other forms of knowledge such as technological and production knowhow move centre stage. Then, once the product has been made, at the very end of the value-creating chain, consumer understanding becomes important once again in helping to identify those people most likely to buy and discovering the best ways to send persuasive selling messages to them.