Exploring Markets

Organizations construct their environments themselves. From the bewildering, chaotic array of impressions, they take those bits of information that enable them to produce such a view of the environment – one that makes it possible for them to operate in the environment with relative confidence. Thus, contrary to what traditional market research suggests, organizations do not respond objectively to existing environmental conditions, but invent, construct and create their realities themselves.The goal of exploring the environment –or, more specifically, exploring markets – is to influence this construction process through re-framing, de-generalization and hypothesis formation and thus to allow organizations to discover unusual things.

Stefan Kühl is professor of sociology at the University of Bielefeld in Germany and works as a consultant for Metaplan, a consulting firm based in Princeton, Hamburg, Shanghai, Singapore, Versailles and Zurich.