Being ‘consumer centric’ and ‘insight led’ is everything these days. Unilever’s director of global marketing strategy was quoted this week “What differentiates world-class companies is a genuine culture of insightfulness.”

But when business and marketing people talk about insight, what actually do we mean? Or think we mean? Or think we want?

Every year over $30bn is spent globally on market research. That’s a considerable amount of money spent on getting data about consumers’ awareness, attitudes, lifestyle, usage, needs mapping, advertising response, market segmentation, competitive analysis, pricing dynamics, shopper experience, and increasingly now real-time monitoring of popular opinion in social media.

But how much of that data actually represents fresh, meaningful, actionable insight? Almost exclusively market research focuses on analysing people as consumers. Marketing became so self-obsessed it forgot that consumers, markets, business, they’re all social constructs. But it’s seemingly not yet world-aware enough to consider gaining wider insight about people and society from social science.

Two weeks ago the great and the good of the international social science community convened in Gothenberg for the 17th International Sociological Association Congress. The final plenary session focused on critical questions facing the discipline of sociology today. For instance, among other things, the implications of the fact that sustainability requires that new relations be intentionally established between society and nature. There’s quite a lot just in that thought…

Actually since the early 80s sociologists have had lots of interesting things to say about the implications of sustainability on society. In 1987, for instance, Prof. Michael Redclift (King’s College, University of London) published findings of extensive ‘market research’ into global public opinion on the trade-off between environmental protection and commercial growth, and the implications on consumer lifestyles.

More than two decades later we’re relying on focus groups conducted in airless rooms with artless questions being posed about artificial attitudes towards Brand X’s ‘exciting new sustainability concept’. Might not sociological research, and probably psychological too, provide something a bit more ‘consumer centric’ and ‘insight led’ than that?

A recent Accenture survey of marketing executives in the States and UK found that 70% have difficulty capturing the attention of consumers with their marketing campaigns. Well guys, here’s a chance to try something new. Maybe just $1m of that $30bn..?