Introduction
The Consumer-Oriented Approach to Marketing
New Products and their Meanings
Paradoxes of Meaning
Whose Marketplace is it Anyway?
Innovation and the Creative Consumer
Revisiting the Time of Adoption and Resistance
When Innovation Becomes Creativity
Conspicuous Consumption, Downshifting and Reconsumption
Production and Consumption
Conclusion
Bibliography
Index

Understanding the Consumer brings together marketing theory and practice in a truly consumer-centric approach. It challenges the lip service usually paid to this concept and demonstrates that a thorough understanding of the consumer is critical for effective marketing. It also analyzes how in all the marketing hype the consumer-centric approach is often lost to other gimmicks.
Isabelle Szmigin draws from the most recent analysis in marketing literature and explains how consumers respond and act in the market with particular attention to:

- relationships with suppliers, products and brands

- their innovative, creative and resistant behaviour

- the complexity and unpredictability of their consumption behaviour

- their increasing need to get closer to production

This book bridges the gap between the theoretical discussion of issues in advanced marketing theory and the conventional textbook. The author combines a jargon-free approach to the subject with an illustration of the relevant theory using practical, topical examples from the marketplace as well as drawing on other business related disciplines, including sociology and economics, to support her arguments.