ABSTRACT
The first thing to note, when addressing the relationship between marketing and consumer research, is that the link between promotional practices for advancing specific exchange processes and insight into the sociological factors guiding engagement in such social exchange processes can be found in market relations from the dawn of markets. The term consumer research underlines the distinctly individualized decision science approach that has dominated this discipline throughout the years, albeit with significant change over the last decades, mainly represented by the Consumer Culture Theory version of consumer research. This chapter explores the history of this uneasy relationship between marketing and consumer research, and concludes with some prospective reflections on the future of this relationship. Overall, research on consumption and consumers has been relatively marginalized outside of the marketing discipline, the most notable exception possibly being the sociology of consumption community in Europe.
