We're still with Categories but with the reminder that the categories customers use are much more important than the ones that marketers use or would like their customers to use.  Of course with effective marketing you may indeed be able to change the way they categorise. But ignore what they are used to doing at your peril.  So many marketing and research meetings take for granted the way categories are constructed - much of the value of market research is to report back that it ain't necessarily so.

I have a very simple example from a workshop I ran a number of years ago for the management team of a major jewellery brand. We made a list of competitors and put it on a map. In other words we mapped the category as we saw it.  The names on that map were quite predictable - all names of famous and substantial jewellery brands.  But then in a subsequent exercise I asked a different question. I asked people to talk about the jewellery they owned, where they had got it from and what it meant to them. At which point i found that some bought from street markets, some had had jewellery handed down by family members which had huge emotional resonance for them. None of this had been mentioned when mapping the jewellery category. The jewellery category which can be easily mapped by ripping ads out of magazines. And these were the same people who were creating and selling jewellery for others!

There is the world as the marketers would like it to be. And there is the world as customer see it. Very different. Actually marketers need to have both to avoid making basic errors. The best marketers bring the two worlds together to create competitive advantage because they tap into the real world and wants and needs of their customers which are still stronger than the strongest aspirations marketers try to foist upon them.

A waggledancing technique I am going to return to is interviewing the client organisation. Which tells you as much about a market as interviewing the customers. But I am going to leave that for now.