After the Neolithic transition, arguably the most important economic shift was the industrial revolution. Prior to the industrial revolution, for the previous 10,000 years, the world relied (almost) exclusively on small-scale agriculture or pastoralism for economic production. The industrial revolution, starting largely with the development of the steam engine, had a profound effect on the material relationship of the individual to economic production, as individuals became part of industrial production. This change also had significant impacts on demographics: cities grew as the economics drove mass migrations away from rural areas to industrialized areas. Industrialization also had a long-lasting effect on politics, as workers organized to make improvements in working conditions and shift the power balance between labor and capital. Marxism was born of this struggle, and I explore the premises behind this philosophy, and the reasons for expansion as well as ultimate failure of this profoundly influential economic model. Here I speak to the contradictions between modern humanism and the authoritarian application of Marxism, drawing in the discussion on chaos and complexity and the difficulties with attempting central control on something as complex as a national economy.

The touchstone of any trademark lawsuit is the likelihood of consumer confusion. Courts calculate this likelihood through a series of notoriously unreliable proxies, lamenting that their effort to understand the consumer must be a “shaky kind of guess.” Through the burgeoning field of consumer neuroscience, scientists can now determine when a subject is thinking about one brand versus another. Take, for example, recent research measuring changes in brain blood flow and oxygenation while subjects viewed several well-known trademarks. According to the researchers, each trademark has a different neural signature, with different brain regions reflecting perceptions like “excitement,” “ruggedness,” or “sophistication” upon exposure to the brand stimulus. By viewing these neural signatures and nothing else, researchers could distinguish whether the subject was thinking about Apple or Microsoft, Coke or Pepsi. Studies like this hint at a near future where fMRI readings replace today’s judicial guesswork about consumer perception.

An emerging group of marketing experts strove to manage the apparent contradictions of interwar German capitalism with consumer markets that seemed increasingly rationalized yet at the same time highly volatile and emotional. This chapter explores the professional and intellectual debates surrounding consumer capitalism during the 1920s and early 1930s. I ask about the professional perceptions especially among market researchers as well as among product designers and graphic artists. In trade journals and professional publications of the era, we find contradictory analyses of the nature of consumer markets and divergent opinions over what type of expert was best suited to managing them – engineers, psychologists, or even artists? Whereas interwar designers frequently stressed the importance of functionality and standardization, market researchers emphasized the emotional side of modern consumption. They all shared, however, a common belief in the growing importance of consumers as actors in interwar capitalism.

As we have seen so far in this book, the IoT comprises various connected devices, services, and systems. Connecting regular devices to the Internet has made it much easier for companies to protect their interests in consumer transactions. New technologies allow companies to continue to wield significant control over us and our devices beyond the point of sale, license, or lease. As Aaron Perzanowski and Jason Schultz have observed, the IoT “threatens our sense of control over the devices we purchase.”1 Of chief concern is companies’ use of technology to control our devices and actions and digitally restrain our activities in lending transactions.

The IoT raises several questions germane to traditional products liability law and the UCC’s warranty provisions. These include how best to evaluate and remedy consumer harms related to insecure devices, malfunctioning devices, and the termination of services and software integral to a device’s operations. Consider that the modern IoT vehicle with an infotainment system generates massive quantities of data about drivers, and that mobile applications can be used to impact the operations of these vehicles.

The illegitimacy of present accounts of privacy is revealed by the manner in which normalisation has long taken place through a series of social transitions. Other historical perspectives of societal evolution have been adopted, but the mythological analysis here is distinctive. Following Christian confessionalism and pastoralism, we see the methods of governmentalizing discipline that led to the civilising of the sovereign State through the rise of the bourgeoisie; then the liberalism and neoliberalism that ultimately promoted the dominance of the Market over the State, by which the consumer has been constructed; and now the Technological ‘algorisation’ of social and individual perspective and practice. Many of the elements that have accumulated in this long process are thereby being brought to bear in technologies of the self as self-creation. Each of these regimes was founded on the distancing and camouflage of existential reality, inducing subjection to the ideas and practices promoted within these mythological magnitudes and primarily for the benefit of their respective dominant interests.

This chapter examines the effective use of research to assist in the creative development of marketing communications. By this, we do not mean dry quantitative statistics (although this too can yield insights) but rather a thorough understanding of the thoughts, feelings and relationship of the target audience with the brand or category. In this chapter, we assume that qualitative research, when conducted well, will yield workable insights but, when conducted badly, will yield misleading results that lead to disastrous outcomes. The ability to uncover workable insights is an important skill to develop so we will focus on how to achieve this competence.

Trade is the most direct form to promote market exchange and international division of labor. The volume of China-Africa trade has been growing phenomenally through the efforts of numerous pioneering merchants on both sides. While African consumers get more choices of reasonably priced goods, the weakness of regulation and inspection threatens healthy development of market. At the early stage of a market economy, authorities usually do not have sufficient capacity, knowledge, or experience of managing the complex markets; therefore illegal traders take advantage of the loopholes to flood African markets with substandard inferior products. To nurture the burgeoning market, Chinese and African authorities do not demand wholesale elevation of quality requirements, but instead take incremental steps to enhance communication and inspection measures. Short-term individual demands of consumers and sellers find balance with long-term public interests of market order gradually through evolving business practices. Another issue is the imbalance of trade structure. China exports mainly industrial products and imports natural resources from Africa. Although the trade imbalance is a result of market liberalization and comparative advantage, it’s unsustainable economically and generates negative sociopolitical consequences. Comprehensive industrialization of Africa is needed to change the situation.

We suggest that consumer and marketer intelligence is, in its essence, practical. It is derived from adapting to, selecting, and shaping external environments. We review research relating to marketers’ and consumers’ strategies for interacting, intelligently, with their environments. On adapting, illustratively we point to a trend toward more fine-tuned adaptations in marketing communication, enabled by the large amount of information consumers are leaving online. On selection, illustratively we report research relating to customer relationship management: “big data” has enabled more informed, consequently more intelligent, customer selection by marketers. On shaping, illustratively we describe research relating to online customer reviews and the sea change it has had on the retail environment. Taking perspective, we opine that while adapting, shaping, and selection intelligence enable important, immediate outcomes, wisdom is needed, in addition, to achieve longer-term outcomes. A quintessential longer-term outcome for marketers is brand equity and for consumers is psychological well-being.