Market research pervades society. It is an endeavour that connects marketing practice with methods similar to social science. Further, market research results appear as knowledge produced to inform recipients towards making productive business decisions and as a commodity sold to commissioning clients. I suggest that such commissioned knowledge production must be approached taking into account both the making and the marketing of such material. The position of market research between concerns to know through research and to market goods and services, including its own, has been approached differently in academic scholarship. Examples range from criticism against surveillance and manipulation, to calls to defining the benefits of market research techniques for organising markets and societies. Researchers have tried to explain this knowledge making for market research as a construction of objects of knowledge or as a performative phenomenon. This thesis takes an ethnographic and cultural approach to market research work and the researchers that undertake it. Based on fieldwork with Swedish firm Norna (pseudonym) and handbooks from industry organisation ESOMAR, the thesis inquires into the epistemic practices and epistemology of market research, how market researchers consider their work influenced by the relations that they maintain and how ideas and practices in market research inform understanding of commissioned knowledge production. The thesis consists of four articles dealing with the ideas, actors and processes that engage market researchers. The first article assesses market research industry handbooks and discusses the contribution of performativity approaches in light of this local epistemology. The second article studies how market researchers shape their respondents as part of producing consumer knowledge. The third article assesses how the work processes of market research knowledge production rely on the production and distribution of ignorance to successfully keep respondents and clients at the right certainty interval. The fourth article examines client relations and how market researchers produce materials to satisfy clients as well as shape clients’ preferences and understanding. The findings of the thesis point to how market research features its own local epistemics and reflexivity on the part of researchers, but also the tensions and ambiguities involved. Market researchers handle commercial pressures and epistemic quandaries in parallel and overlapping relational practice through the production and deployment of both knowledge and ignorance. Dealing with clients and respondents transcends the distinction between the commercial and the informative. The text informs a further understanding of market research, its techniques by means of engaging with how its researchers view this activity. Further it challenges the social study of knowledge production by showing how in this case it includes concerns that are not simplistically commercial or epistemic. Marknadsundersökningar är en verksamhet i gränslandet mellan marknadsföring och samhällsvetenskapliga forskningsmetoder. Det material som marknadsundersökare tar fram ska både informera kunder och säljas till dem. Denna uppdragsbaserade kunskapsproduktion måste förstås både som kunskaps- och marknadsföringspraktik. Det är en dubbelhet som har hanterats på skilda sätt i tidigare forskning. Kritiker har diskuterat marknadsundersökningar som del av en manipulativ marknadsföringsindustri medan försvarare snarare förordat förbättrande av kunskaper kring människors behov. Skapandet av kunskap i marknadsundersökningar har ömsom setts som en konstruktion och ömsom diskuterats som ett fenomen där beskrivningen formar det som beskrivs. Avhandlingen tar sig an marknadsundersökningar genom en etnografisk studie av marknadsundersökare och deras arbete. Med utgångspunkt i handböcker från branschorganisationen ESOMAR, samt deltagande observation på det svenska marknadsundersökningsföretaget Norna (pseudonym), diskuteras marknadsundersökningar utifrån en rad fokusområden: Utsagor om kunskap såväl som praktiker i kunskapsproduktion, hur marknadsundersökare ser sin verksamhet i relation till kunder och respondenter samt hur undersökningar görs säljbara och användbare för uppdragsgivare. Avhandlingen innehåller fyra delstudier som i form av artiklar studerar olika aspekter av marknadsundersökningsarbete. Den första artikeln studerar handböcker från ESOMAR och undersöker vilket bidrag som kan göras vid analys givet att undersökarna själva formulerar idéer om sin verksamhet. Den andra artikeln handlar om hur marknadsundersökare formar deltagare i undersökningar som del av sin produktion av kunskap om konsumenter. Den tredje artikeln går igenom Nornas arbetsprocess med fokus kring hur kunskapsproduktion också handlar om att generera okunskap för att respondenter och kunder ska kunna förstå och delta. Den fjärde artikeln avhandlar relationen till undersökningens beställare och hur marknadsundersökare formar sitt material för att tillfredsställa kunden, samtidigt som deras preferenser formas för att producera ett gott mottagande av undersökningsresultat. Avhandlingen visar hur marknadsundersökningar karaktäriseras av förutsättningar för kunskapsproduktion och hur marknadsundersökare själva är reflekterande kring sitt arbete. Den ambivalens och de spänningar som kännetecknar marknadsundersökningar som verksamhet diskuteras i termer av hur marknadsundersökare samtidigt hanterar kommersiella såväl som kunskapsteoretiska aspekter av arbetet. Genom att fokusera på hur marknadsundersökningar är en relationell verksamhet visas också hur marknadsundersökare hanterar spänningar mellan vikten av att göra undersökningar som hjälper kunden och att få kunder att köpa undersökningar. Genom att utgå från hur marknadsundersökare själva ser på dessa frågor ger studien en sammanvägd bild av hur uppdragsbaserad kunskapsproduktion handlar om såväl relationsarbete som att skapa kunskap som beskriver marknader och konsumenter.

Douglas Bullis goes beyond the usual superficial accounts found in the usual import/export books and provides something truly unique: an in-depth analysis of what India needs from the rest of the world, not what the world can get out of India. What most businesspeople don't know, and what is crucial if they are to succeed in their transactions with India, is what India needs from them—and not always is this mere capital. Bullis describes the rise of India's middle class and consumer economy since 1991, and provides readers with what very few outsiders know: how India really works. The result is an essential resource for corporate management in marketing, sales, strategic planning and investment, and important collateral reading for students and teachers of international business. Bullis argues that India has long been misunderstood by the West. Now, as the business climate goes global, India looms as the largest country in the world to embrace the market economy. As India emerges as a mass consumer market and a major low-cost manufacturing center, not only the Indian economy, but the world economy is likely to be changed. If overseas businesspeople are to enter India and compete successfully, they need a clear, broad, up-to-the-minute and useful view of the country, its markets, its resources, and its people. In this book, Bullis provides just that.

Yuwa Hendrick-Wong analyses how a convergence of increasing longevity, improving health status and compression of morbidity, and more flexible arrangement in the labour market will fundamentally alter how the elderly populations live and work in Asia.

Packaging for the fast moving consumer goods market plays a vital role in promoting the product to the customer as well as in carrying informative and legislative detail. Combining these roles requires commercial awareness, detailed knowledge of the relevant technologies, creative care and consideration of the effects of colors, typefaces, and images that must support the brand, position the product and provide the required product stand-out at the point of sale. With an emphasis on technology, this practical handbook details the printing technologies and labeling formats used on the mainstream structural packaging found in consumer markets worldwide.