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Summary Lectures & articles discussed Consumer Psychology
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Lecture 1 – Introduction‘Products don’t build brands, consumers do’ à marketers need to understand what make
consumer tick or what are consumers need that you are trying to meet. Make them willing
to consume the brand. When a consumer uses a brand (e.g., a friend) you mostly also like to
use it.
What is Consumer Psychology (Consumer Behavior)?
In general terms, consumer behavior is a psychologically based study of how individuals
make buying decisions and what motivates them to make a purchase. Several facets of
consumer behavior exist, such as:
- How a consumer feels about certain brand, products, or services
- What motivates a consumer to pick one product over another and why
- What factors in a consumer’s everyday environment affect buying decisions or brand
perceptions and why
More than just products (e.g., going to the dentist, what TV programs to watch, donating to
a cause, etc.). Not only about buying products but also about the use and disuse of products
and services.
Example paper bag, just normal paper bag for €1 à with a brand name on it (Jill Sander’s)
people were willing to pay €260 (sold out in a week) à what drives these consumption
decisions? à Financial resources, emotions, psychological states, beliefs, environment
Experimental consumer research to understand consumer behavior
Experiments allows investigators establish cause-and-effect relationships. In other words,
investigators can isolate different effects by manipulating an independent variable, and
keeping other variables constant, to see how it influences a specific outcome variable.
Does having a lot of options to choose from make us happy? (article)
Intuitions marketeers had was that many choices made consumers happy, but is this still
true?
The paradox of choice – the more choice you are given the unhappier you are, also lower
choice makes you unhappy, in the middle is the sweet spot (nobody knows what it is) but
this leads to certain satisfaction.
,Intuition isn’t always right. In fact, sometimes it is exactly wrong.
In essence, choice overload refers to a cognitive process in which people have a difficult
time making a decision when faced with many options. There are a few reasons for this:
1. It becomes more difficult/stressful to determine which option is the best one for you
2. As humans, we inherently feel sorrow about the opportunities that we forego
3. Moreover, when it’s not clear which option is best for you, you’re more likely to
regret the decision that you eventually do make
When choice is demotivating: can one desire too much of a good thing?
Hypothesis: having a limited and more manageable set of choices may be more intrinsically
motivating than having an overly extensive set of choices.
Study 1.
Field study à supermarket, condition one tasting booth with six different flavors
à supermarket, condition two tasting booth with 24 different flavors
à two consecutive Saturdays, displays rotated hourly and counterbalanced
between days (attempts to decrease confounding variables!)
Outcome à the attractiveness was higher for the 24 different flavors booth, the number
sampled was also higher for the 24 different flavors booth, but the number of purchases
was higher (10 times more) for the six different flavors booth.
Study 2.
Lab Experiment à 6 essay topics vs. 30 essay topics
à DV 1: % chose to write the essay
à DV 2: Quality of the essay
à Randomly assigned, to make the investigated groups as equal as possible
Outcome à completion of the essay topic was higher with the 6 essay topics. Next to that,
the quality was also higher in comparison with the 30 essay topics.
Study 3.
Experiment à self-selection from limited array of chocolate (6 choices)
à self-selection from extensive array of chocolate (30 choices)
à control group chocolate was chosen for them
à DV 1: satisfaction with the choosing process
à DV 2: expectations concerning their sampled chocolate
à DV 3: satisfaction with their sampled chocolate
à DV 4: purchasing behavior
à randomly assigned
Outcome à no varity by condition for satisfaction, no difference of how informed they felt
about their choices. Extensive choice more enjoyable but also more difficult and frustrated
than the limited choices. Limited choice condition were more satisfied with their sampled
choise than the extensive condition. Participants in the limited choice condition (48%) were
,more likely to choose chocolates as compensation, as compared to the extensive choice
condition (12%), and the no choice condition (10%).
Choice overload can leave you dissatisfied with the choice you made, what is often
described as ‘buyer’s remorse’. Or it can even lead to behavioral (choice or decisions)
paralysis, which is a situation ‘where people are faced with so many choices that they can’t
decide among them and make no choice at all.’
Field Experiment
Field experiments are done in the everyday (i.e., real life) environment of the participants.
The experimenter still manipulates the independent variables, but in a real-life setting.
Strength: Behavior in a field experiment is more likely to reflect real life because of its
natural setting, i.e., higher ecological validity than a lab experiment. Also, there is less
likelihood of demand characteristics affecting the results, as participants may not know they
are being studied. This occurs when the study is covert.
Limitations: There is less control over extraneous variables that might bias the results. This
makes it difficult for another researcher to replicate the study in exactly the same way.
When are consumers most likely to feel overwhelmed by their options?
When you experience choice overload you either experience certain subjective states
(psychological states, personal to you, things like choice satisfactions, decision regret, and
lack of confidence in the choice made) or behavioral outcome (choice deferral, switching
likelihood, assortment choice, and option selection). Number of options given will only lead
to choice overload under specific conditions.
When dissatisfaction with too much choice becomes likely…
- Choice-set complexity: How are the options organized, is there a dominant option,
and what information is provided about each option? For example, you may have
five laptop options to choose from but see 10 pieces of information about each. Or
you may be presented 10 laptop options but only one piece of information about
each. The former is a more complex choice set and is likelier to result in choice
overload.
- Decision-task difficulty: How difficult is the actual act of deciding? Some decisions
must be made quickly, like choosing a meal option from a menu, while others may
have much longer time limits or none at all. The lesser time you have to make a
choice the more likely it will lead to choice overload.
- Preference uncertainty: How much do you already know what you want? The more
you know about your preferences, the easier it is to make a choice. If you have
already established that buying a Fairtrade peanut butter is your most important
consideration in choosing a peanut butter jar, for instance, it will be easy to compare
multiple options along this dimension.
- Decision goal: Are you buying or browsing? What is the ultimate goal of sifting
through all of these options? If the goal is to make a conclusive choice, that may
mean considering trade-offs carefully and potentially agonizing over a decision. If,
alternatively, the goal is just to gather information that may help with a future
, decision – such as browsing cars or looking at potential rental homes – then choice
overload may be less likely.
So, four conditions under which consumer may experience choice overload:
1. When people don’t have the time and want to make a quick and easy choice
2. When the product is complex (so fewer choices help the consumer make a decision)
3. When you don’t have any prior information
4. When the goal is to purchase as opposed to browse
How can a marketeer help reduce choice overload?
- Provide filters, narrow down the number of choices
- Provide a dominant choice (e.g., coolblue’s choice)
- Compare button
- Free return à gives piece of mind
- Interactive quiz to guide buyers
Too much choice leads to choice overload (buyer’s remorse or choice paralysis), if you as a
retailer can’t facilitate consumer decision making process in a sea of choices.
Lecture 2 – The Self in the Marketplace
The self à the core fundamental values or believes that we make us who we believe we are
or think we are and how that influences our behavior in the marketplace.
What drives consumer behavior? à refers to what motivates consumer behavior?
Motivation (emotions, culture, situational factors, beliefs & values and contextual factors) is
what moves people to take certain actions. It is defined as ‘an inner state of arousal’, with
the aroused energy directed to achieving a goal. The motivated consumer is energized,
ready, and willing to engage in a goal-relevant activity in the consumption domain.
Motives are influenced by self-concept. What motivates consumers?
The self in the marketplace:
- Understanding the self-concept
- How elements of the self-concept drive consumer behavior: political and religious
ideologies and cultural determinants of the self
- Understanding how you can apply this knowledge as marketers
In psychology, this sense of self has a specific term: self-concept. Self-concept is generally
thought of as out individual perceptions of our behavior, identities, abilities, beliefs and
unique characteristics – a mental picture of who you are as a person (personality identities,
beliefs values and psychological states).
Self-concept theory
There are many theories about what exactly self-concept is and how it develops. Generally,
theorist agree on the following points:
- On the broadest level, self-concept is the overall idea we have about who we are and
includes cognitive (mostly related to competences and abilities) and affective (how I
feel about myself) judgments about ourselves;
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