Trade mark law is motivated in part by the goal of protecting certain consumer understandings. But courts typically treat such consumer understanding as a pre-determined, relatively fixed, fact to which the template of trade mark law can be applied and from which answers to the relevant legal questions thus inevitably flow. Prof Dinwoodie challenges this approach as descriptively incomplete and prescriptively harmful. He argues that trade mark law should be less fixated on ascertaining, acting upon, and declaring, empirical realities of consumer association and confusion. Instead, courts need more openly – and more fully – to understand trade mark law as a normative project. In this climate, efforts to enhance the quality of factual input to particular trade mark disputes should be a lower priority for trade mark law. And, if over-emphasised in ways that downplay the normative character of trade mark law, such well-intentioned efforts at improved empiricism may even be counterproductive.