Marketing Research in the Contemporary Consumer Environment

The modern era of information technology has seen a process of shift from traditional marketing communication to personal communication, i.e. "listening in on" the opinions, wishes and preferences of individual customers expressed by customers in their online communication through various social networks, as well as using questionnaires and online panels, and this trend is bound to rise in the future. Rather than creating products, customers are being created. What companies should realise is that their task and objective is not production of products, but consumption by consumers. The importance of relationships and stakeholders is becoming the priority. The basis of any well-devised marketing orientation lies in solid customer relationships, and the pillar of modern marketing philosophy is customer understanding, which is a step further from the widespread concept of customer knowledge. It can be argued that lifestyles figure as a sort of portraits of personalities and their interactions with the given environment. It is the individuals in a particular environment that create values, beliefs, customs and rituals forming and influencing people's behaviour and their lifestyles. Consumer culture is a response to these behaviour patterns, a social phenomenon present in the environment comprisingmultiple frameworks of human behaviour, where consumers' aims, wishes and needs are formed, as well as acceptable tools for attaining customers' goals.