These are questions that consumer researchers are today purposefully grappling with for the first time, and no less than at the highest level of the profession.
Most notable is the rise of Transformative Consumer Research, a movement that focuses on important topics of our time - consumer issues in 'base-of-the-pyramid' country contexts, environmental, cultural and social sustainability and the harmful effects of consumer behaviours. The key word "transformative" signifies important and constructive influence, including the potential for uplifting change.
Transformative Consumer Research is being tackled most notably through the latest initiative by the Association for Consumer Research (ACR), the world's leading consumer research body, which has just set up an Advisory Committee to fire up research in this regard.
In his 2005 Presidential Address at the North American Conference of the ACR, David Mick, President of the ACR, argued that consumer researchers today "must do more than just think or converse about consumer welfare. As one Chinese proverb states matter-of-factly: 'Talk doesn't cook rice'."
Transformative Consumer Research is not something new, nor has it been dormant. Mick explained. It has, however, "received little systematic effort to draw together the resources and skills to work on consumer welfare, little systematic effort to encourage and reward more of this sort of research, and little systematic effort to inform either the public, consumer advisors, or policy administrators who would most gain from learning of the research and its implications."
Indeed, globally there are a host of examples that illustrate the dire need for a fresh front in consumer research.
In industrialised countries, there is now the emerging reality of ageing populations. For researchers this has highlighted the need for research into elderly consumers, where issues such as product safety and financial and medical decision-making are key concerns.
In less industrialised countries meanwhile, there is more cultural diversity and more rapid growth, which stresses identity dynamics, harmful consumer behaviours and social marketing.
Similarly, there is a diversity of problems that firms encounter now when globalising marketing operations. Researchers are increasingly recognising the diversity and special characteristics of less industrialised countries, as well as the urgent need to conduct research there to test the validity of marketing theories.
The new era of consumer research has to take place in four key areas. The ACR tabled these recently after an initial task force specifically identified research needs.
Firstly, more research is needed to address consumer groups who may be particularly vulnerable. They include historically-disadvantaged people in the case of a country such as South Africa, but also adolescents, the elderly, the disabled and other people who live in poverty.
The second area is consumer behaviours that are generally regarded as personally or socially negative. These would include tobacco and alcohol consumption, overeating (particularly obesity), unprotected sexual behaviour, and gambling.
The third area that needs focus is consumer behaviours that are regarded as more generally positive which transformative consumer research could seek to understand better in order to encourage or guide. This would include ecologically minded and pro-environmental consumer behaviours, preventive and affirmative health decision making and behaviours
Finally, as the fourth category, a miscellany of consumer behaviours were listed that could be addressed under the rubric of transformative consumer research, some of which have received prior research attention, while others very little.
These included: financial decision making, including investing, saving, retirement planning; media consumption, especially television, movies, and video games; product safety generally, and specifically defective products; as well as product and package labelling (e.g. over-the-counter drugs, nutritional information on food products).
A concerted research effort in these categories will undoubtedly go a long way to addressing the short-comings of the traditional focus of most consumer research.
By focusing on consumers who were ignored as marketing developed, and taking a stakeholder view of the firm, Transformative Consumer Research can begin to test the generalisability and boundary conditions of the thinking that drives the discipline and begin to relate better to the problems that top management must solve.
Twenty years ago, marketing was perceived as a discipline that primarily focused on persuading consumers to buy more fast-moving consumer goods. But the days when firms can focus on customers and ignore other stakeholders are gone.
Marketing is increasingly reclaiming its central role in the firm and society, as the only discipline that can design and manage an organisation-wide set of behaviours that deliver value to stakeholders and the firm.
More positive signs come from the support that this new impetuous in Transformative Consumer Research is receiving. Harvard Business School's Professor John Deighton, recently elected editor of the acclaimed Journal of Consumer Research, has announced that a special issue of JCR in 2006 will focus on transformative consumer research.
