by Marcus Collins for Harvard Business Review Every marketer wants to better understand their consumers — their preferences, pain points, and perspectives — to establish a better product-consumer fit. Today, there’s more data available than ever before, yet marketers still struggle with this practice. How can that be? More data should lead to better understanding; yet contemporary marketers find themselves extracting comparatively marginal insight about who these people truly are. That’s because today’s marketers have mistaken information for intimacy. Information — think traffic, engagement on social networking platforms, purchases, and search queries — consists of the factual representations of events that have…