Virtually all marketing driven decision making is driven by what the individual consumer thinks. A whole market research industry has grown up around finding the right people, asking them questions, trying to ensure their answers are representative of larger numbers of people. Then aggregating them until you have a level of confidence in the answers. This is not the only form of decision making support. This is only the bottom up kind.

You can also start from the top with those things which everyone agrees on: language, culture, social norms - these are the object of study for the social sciences and they don't all use research to validate. This is the culture end of the market and my nickname for practitioners in this area are the culture vultures. They included semoticians, anthropologists, discourse analysts, archetypists and narrative theorists. And that's just for starters.

To give you a flavour here's a presentation from Greg Rowland with whom I have collaborated in the past. Greg is a semiotician. At a Unilever conference last month I heard a research client raving about what Greg and his team bring to the business - better than research any day he said.

Here's the link - what can we learn about the election of Barack Obama and the refocussing of the American Dream? Greg's website is here.

Let me know what you think of life seen from the top down perspective of a culture vulture - if we get enough interest perhaps we could organise a whole day on the subject.