CONSUMER BEHAVIOR

Consumer Behavior

Consumer Behavior

Introduction

The study of consumers and consumption originated within economics, but since the 1960s it has become a discipline in its own right, drawing on theories and methods from psychology, sociology and anthropology as well as semiotics and literary theory. The majority of studies of consumer behaviour have addressed it at the individual level, often using experimental methods to explore cognition. More recent approaches have moved to the sociocultural level and drawn on contemporary social theory. In parallel with this development, there has been a shift away from positivist assumptions about reality towards interpretivist approaches based on the idea of the social construction of reality (Zukin, 2004, 1).

Origins of the study of consumer behaviour and its importance

The focus of most early work was on the decision process, operationalized as a choice between competing brands. There is now general agreement on a sequential-stage model of information-processing that starts with problem recognition, followed by information search, evaluation of alternatives and finally product choice. This model of a rational consumer seeking a solution to a problem has been mirrored in much advertising that seeks to stimulate recognition of a problem and to demonstrate its solution by a specific brand. Each stage in the process has been studied in great detail and it has become clear that it is rare for a consumer to act fully rationally, particularly in searching for information and processing it to reach an optimal choice. A key variable is the degree of involvement that the consumer has with the product category. This predicts a range of behaviour from low-involvement habitual decisions at one extreme to high-involvement extensive problem-solving at the other.

Involvement is a complex concept that attempts to combine perceptions of risk with the importance of the product to the individual consumer. Often the most highly involving products are those with symbolic meaning for the individual's sense of self. At low levels of involvement, consumers are likely to engage in very limited information search and to use simple decision heuristics such as selecting a brand whose name they recall, or buying-the-brand-last-bought. Levels of involvement have also been found to predict the amount of attention and processing that consumers will give to advertisements. In low-involvement categories, frequent repetition is required to increase levels of brand awareness, and it is brand awareness that has been found empirically to be the best predictor of purchaser behaviour in these product categories (Scott, 2008, 99).

Product and evaluation process for marketing

For products in the mid-range of involvement, the evaluation process has been modelled using multi-attribute attitude theory, which predicts consumer behaviour based on an evaluation of a limited number of salient beliefs about a product's attributes and the relative importance of these attributes to the consumer. The theory of reasoned action includes an assessment of social influence on behaviour. This model has been supported by a meta-analysis of several hundred studies to predict consumer behaviour in situations where the product or service is sufficiently high-involvement to motivate cognitive processing (George, 2007, 96)

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