Seeing like a Competitor: the Emergence of Market and Consumer Research in Britain, 1920-1950

Dr. Stefan Schwarzkopf

Centre for Business History

Abstract

The presentation will begin with an overview of the development of market and consumer research activities in Britain in the first half of the twentieth century. Early market researchers attempted to convince manufacturers and retailers that more information on consumer preferences constituted indispensable know-how in a marketing environment which shifted from proprietory/family capitalism to managerial forms of company organization.

Business historians have described this shift as a “revolution” during which new and better knowledge replaced older knowledge that was less adequate in solving problems. By drawing on the work of Thomas Kuhn and Joseph Schumpeter, I will argue in contrast that the emergence of a market research orientation constituted a paradigm shift in which new problems, not new solutions, were created. Market and consumer research disrupted existing managerial epistemologies and caused companies to suffer from marketing polyopia as the visibility of solutions to marketing problems became blurred and too many strategic options appeared at the same time. Market researchers introduced new ways of seeing and these were largely incommensurable with the way businesses looked at their operations, markets and consumers before the interwar years.

This case study has implications that go beyond the history of marketing as a business practice but ultimately points at the limitations of the rhetoric of strategic competitiveness and value creation which many marketing scholars have come to rely upon to legitimize their intellectual production.