MARKETING COMMUNICATION

Buyer Behavior And Marketing Communication



Buyer Behavior And Marketing Communication

Introduction

The consistency of much human behaviour is maintained by its social and physical settings, irrespective of the personal dispositions of the individuals who perform it (Barker, 1968; Taylor, 1988; cf. Canter, 1977). A great deal of consumer behaviour in commercial banks, for instance, exhibits a typical pattern of response, regardless of who the consumers are, their attitudes, interpersonal response traits or need for cognition. Different but unique and predictable norms of overt consumer behaviour are evinced by the same individuals when they are spectators at a football game, and again when they buy milk at the supermarket, take dancing lessons, or browse in a bookstore. As people move between environments, some of the changes in their behaviour are more readily predicted by their new surroundings than the personal psychologies they take with them (Studer, 1973; Wohlwil, 1973). Moreover, each environment's peculiar pattern of behaviour persists over time, though the people who perform it are replaced by others from day to day or even hour to hour (Barker, 1987; Wicker, 1987).

The situational determination of consumption is, nevertheless, easily overlooked by consumer research, which concentrates on the effects of intrapersonal information processing. The omission is understandable, given the ubiquity and success of the cognitive paradigm. While such research usually specifies the context of the behaviour it investigates, it is not the role of cognitive models to explain why consumption is located in this place rather than that, or to predict consumer choice from detailed knowledge of its context. Nevertheless, a significant consequence is that, despite periodic interest in the situational determinants of consumer choice (Belk, 1975; Kakkar and Lutz, 1975; Troye, 1985; Hackett et al., 1993; Timmermans, 1993) and its empirical investigation (e.g. Milliman, 1982; Park et al., 1989), consumer psychology lacks empirically-grounded theoretical frameworks which contextualize its subject matter.

Foxall (1990) proposes a neo-Skinnerian theory of situational influence on consumer behaviour in which the responses of consumers are determined by the contingencies of reinforcement under which they are emitted (Skinner, 1938; 1953; 1974)[1]. According to the behavioural perspective model (BPM), aspects of consumer behaviour are predictable from two dimensions of situational influence:

the consumer behaviour setting; and

the utilitarian and informational reinforcement signalled by the setting as primed by the consumer's learning history.

The meaning of the behaviour which is emitted in those circumstances is uniquely a product of the interaction between the discriminative stimuli that comprise the behaviour setting and the individual's history of reinforcement and punishment in similar settings (Foxall, 1995a). The consumer situation, defined at the intersection of setting and history, explains consumer behaviour by locating it in space and time (Foxall, 1992; 1993). Consumer behaviours are thus contextualised rather differently than is customary in cognitive consumer research, in which the mainsprings of overt behaviour are sought in intrapersonal information processing.

The BPM research programme is concerned to establish the epistemological status of this interpretation of consumer choice as environmentally controlled (Foxall, 1994; 1996). The extent to which an interpretation can be publicly corroborated ...