What is it? Markets can be divided into different customer segments. Smart firms do not necessarily try to target every possible customer in every segment. Instead, they get to know members of different segments as well as they can, a happy state of affairs known as 'customer intimacy'. This is what market research is for: finding out who the customers might be, what they want, and what they are prepared to pay. Hence the focus groups, the opinion polling, the hassled-looking people in the high street with clipboards, all looking for precious customer information.

Where did it come from? As business developed in the early 20th century, with a steadily larger and more varied customer base emerging, it became obvious that simply treating all customers the same no longer made sense. Henry Ford may have said that people could have any colour car they wanted, 'so long as it's black', but that view faded away. So market research was born - and with it too, arguably, the end of privacy. Our customer choices were no longer our own affair. Business started sticking its nose into our shopping bags and hasn't taken it out since.

Where is it going? 'Data is the new plastics', it is being said. In other words, the cool thing to do now is get hold of as much high-quality information as you can. Market research is smartening up. Online polling may generate better-quality data than more traditional methods. But, clearly, not everyone is online and nor is everybody happy offering up personal information to an anonymous computer. Just as marketing has to work effectively in whichever channel it's operating, so does market research. So we haven't seen the end of the telephone survey, or even the face-to-face chat.

Fad quotient (out of 10): Six and on the up.

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