Consumer Behavior
A Short Introduction
Consumer behaviour is the study of individuals, groups,
or organizations and all the activities associated with
the purchase, use and disposal of goods and services,
including the consumer's emotional, mental and behavioural
responses that precede or follow these activities.
Consumer behaviour emerged in the 1940s and 50s as a distinct
sub-discipline in the marketing area.
In the 1940s and 50's, marketing was dominated by the so-called classical schools of
thought which were highly descriptive and relied heavily on case study approaches with
only occasional use of interview methods. At the end of the 1950s, two important reports
criticised marketing for its lack of methodological rigor, especially the failure to adopt
mathematically-oriented behavioural science research methods.
From the 1950s, marketing began to shift is reliance away from economics and towards other
disciplines, notably the behavioural sciences, including sociology, anthropology and
clinical psychology. This resulted in a new emphasis on the customer as a unit of analysis.
As a result, new substantive knowledge was added to the marketing discipline – including
such ideas as opinion leadership, reference groups and brand loyalty.
Market segmentation, especially demographic segmentation based on socioeconomic status
(SES) index and household life-cycle, also became fashionable. With the addition of
consumer behaviour, the marketing discipline exhibited increasing scientific sophistication
with respect to theory development and testing procedures.
In its early years, consumer behaviour was heavily influenced by motivation research,
which had increased the understanding of customers, and had been used extensively by
consultants in the advertising industry and also within the discipline of psychology
in the 1920s, '30s and '40s. By the 1950s, marketing began to adopt techniques used by
motivation researchers including depth interviews, projective techniques, thematic
apperception tests and a range of qualitative and quantitative research methods.
More recently, scholars have added a new set of tools including: ethnography,
photo-elicitation techniques and phenomenological interviewing. Today, consumer behaviour
(or CB as it is affectionately known) is regarded as an important sub-discipline within
marketing and is included as a unit of study in almost all undergraduate marketing programs.