Dear Sir/Madam,

Thank you for sending me your latest market research survey. Unfortunately I was unable to complete it, owing to the fact that I'm what those clever dicks in advertising term a “need-directed consumer” — someone so dirt-poor they only ever buy what they can afford. Yep, even the wizards of the hard-sell haven't yet been able to come up with a cure for poverty.

However, while I'm not in a position to help you, you may be able to assist me with research I'm currently undertaking into the psychological profiles of philistines, like yourself, who appear hell-bent on filling up the planet with the effluvia of big business and its allied industries.

I would be very grateful, therefore, if you could spend just a little of your time (no more than two days and not less than five-thousand words, please) answering one of the following questions:

1. “Market research is the study of people who do not need to be studied, by people who do.” “Somebody introduced Income Tax. Somebody introduced BSE. Somebody introduced market research.” “All the Golden Ages of man, all the Belles Epoques, were characterised by one thing: an absence of market researchers.” Which of these assessments do you find most wounding? Which comes closest to the truth? What would you do to improve the public image of market research, while continuing to further its pernicious aims?

2. What are the sociological problems involved in the tying of market research, the psychological premise of advertising, and in particular Freudian theories of discontent, to the ideology of commodity fetishism, with its temptation to treat man as a Homo Consumens? And do you believe that people with white stone balls on their gateposts deserve everything that's coming to them?

3. “A society in which consumption has to be artificially stimulated in order to keep production going is a society founded on trash and waste and such a society is a house built upon sand.” Who said that? (a) Me (b) Diana, Princess of Wales or (c) David Beckham? As a corporate arse-licker, does this statement accurately reflect your own role in encouraging profligate levels of consumption and, ultimately, the ruination of the global environment?

The answer you provide will eventually be made available to some of the country's leading psychiatrists and a number of my friends, who may then wish to contact you themselves.

Finally, in anticipation, thank you for your time, and I very much look forward to receiving your reply.

Yours sincerely,

Signed (Your Name or an appropriate pseudonym)

The Institute For The Study Of People Whose Only Interest In Their Fellow Men Revolves Around Trying To Sell Them Something

34-36 Never Enough Road

London WC1 3JB