Abstract:

Every one of us reads a newspaper, from time to time. It may be the Financial Times, Le Figaro, Die Welt, or any other one. Now, I would like to start my presentation of the Luxemburg Seminar by asking you a question: - Did you ever try to briefly summarise any given issue of the Financial Times ? Because if you did, you will probably agree that briefly summarising such a Seminar is more than a challenge to any one. The diversity of topics touched upon, the variety of points of view started from, and the multiplicity of goals probably pursued by the participants made it clear, to me at least, that Market Research is far from being a mature branch of Business as such. I think that we are still very much in the craftsmanship period where problems are posed individualistically, only exceptionally reaching the level of common and relevant-to-most formulations . So, what I will try to do now, is to provide you with only a sample of the very different ideas which were put forward during the Seminar.