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Summary Kardes, Cline and Cronley - Consumer Behaviour
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Consumer Behaviour – Science and Practice (2011)Kardes, Cline and Cronley
Summary by Marloes Evertzen
October 2017
, Chapter 1 - The study of consumer behavior
Define consumer behavior
Consumer behavior entails all consumer activities associated with the purchase, use, and disposal of
goods and services, including the consumers’ emotional, mental, and behavioral responses that pre-
cede these activities:
• Consumers: individual consumers purchase goods and services to satisfy their own personal
needs and wants, or to satisfy the need and wants of others (household goods, gas, gifts, etc.).
Organizational consumers purchase goods and services to produce other goods or services,
resell them to other organizations or to individual consumers, or help manage and run the
organization.
• Consumer activities: categorizing consumer behavior is useful because consumers’ responses
to stimuli may differ per stadium.
o Purchase activities are those through which consumers acquire goods and services.
These activities include everything done leading up to the purchase, such as gathering
and evaluating information.
o Use activities describe where, when, and how consumption takes place.
o Disposal activities are the ways consumers get rid of products and/or packaging after
consumption, and include discarding products, recycling, reuse, and resale.
• Consumer responses:
o Emotional responses reflect a consumer’s emotions, feelings, and moods.
o Mental responses include a person’s thought processes, opinions, beliefs, attitudes
and intentions about products and services.
o Behavioral responses include a consumer’s overt decisions and actions during the pur-
chase, use, and disposal activities.
Explain why it is important to understand consumer behavior
People study consumer behavior for a wide variety of reasons:
• To improve business performance: marketers who understand their consumers can create bet-
ter products and services, promote their products and services more effectively, and develop
marketing plans and strategies that foster sustainable competitive advantage.
• To influence public policy: public policy is the establishment of laws and regulations that gov-
ern business practice to protect consumers. Those interested in shaping public policy study
consumer behavior to understand the public needs and wants, and at the same time, to pro-
tect the public from unfair, unethical, or dangerous business practices.
• To educate and help consumers make better decisions: agencies and organizations involved in
consumer education and assistance study consumer behaviors that are socially (or individu-
ally) destructive. This dark side includes consumer actions that are unhealthy, unethical, illegal,
and potentially dangerous to individuals or society.
Describe how the study of consumer behavior has evolved as a scientific field of study
The marketing concept is the idea that firms should discover and satisfy customer needs and wants in
an efficient and profitable manner, while benefitting the long-term interests of society. Today, the
marketing concept is a core philosophy for many successful organizations. As for the future, the field
of consumer behavior is likely to emphasize satisfying basic customer needs and wants. As a result,
organizations are already focusing on delivering customer perceived value and customer delights.
Customer perceived value is the consumer's overall assessment of the utility of a product based on
perceptions of what is received and what is given (benefits vs. costs). Customer delight is when a prod-
uct does not only meet, but also exceeds expectations a customer had.
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,This book is based on the scientific method, a collection of systematic activities that enable researchers
to study problems and find answers to questions. These steps include:
• Observe and ask the question.
• Form a hypothesis and make a prediction.
• Test the hypothesis.
• Theory generation.
An alternative research approach to behavioral science that relies less on scientific and technological
methodology is called interpretivism (or Postmodernism). Researchers working from this perspective
view consumers as non-rational beings and their reality as highly subjective. These researchers’ goal is
to collect data to describe and interpret this reality. They rather use quantitative research methods
than qualitative methods of research (descriptive, non-empirical data, cannot be generalized, but pro-
vides in-depth analyses).
Discuss how consumer behavior is specifically examined and measured through marketing research
Consumer researchers study consumer responses and activities by using marketing research methods.
Marketing research is a systematic process of planning, collecting, analyzing, and interpreting data and
information relevant to marketing problems and consumer behavior. Unfortunately, sometimes mar-
keters forego conducting marketing research and rely on intuition instead. This can lead to costly busi-
ness mistakes. This is one of the reasons many new products fail (almost 95% fails). Another area of
concern in studying consumer behavior is the unethical and/or unintended manipulation of research
data or results.
Consumer research is divided into two broad categories based on the goals of the research:
• Basic research: looks for general relationships between variables, regardless of the specific
situation. The key benefit is that conclusions drawn from it generally apply across a variety of
situations. Researchers can use these generalizations to guide strategic planning and develop
marketing tactics.
• Applied research: examines many of the same variables, but within a specific context of inter-
est to a marketer. Applied research is more common than basic research because consumer
researchers want to solve business-related problems of immediate interest.
Consumer researchers are especially interested in uncovering two special types of relationships:
• Correlations: when a statistically testable and significant relationship exists between two var-
iables, we say the variables are correlated. You can have a positive (both variables increase/de-
crease together, e.g. advertisement expenditure and sales), negative (one decreases, the other
increases, e.g. malfunctions and customer satisfaction), or zero correlation (no predictable re-
lationship between two variables). Believing there is a correlation, while there isn’t one is
called illusory correlation.
• Causal relationships: capture both correlation and direction of the relationship. A causal rela-
tionship between two variables means that the variables are correlated and that one variable
influences the other, but not vice versa (an increase in advertising expenditure means more
sales, but more sales do not mean more money in advertising). It has the following require-
ments:
o The two variables are correlated
o The cause must precede the effect
o Other potential causes are ruled out
3
, Provide examples of various methods for collecting consumer research data
Where do marketers collect data? There are two broad sources of data:
• Secondary data: data that already exists and is readily accessible. Internal organization sources
include e.g. the customer database, annual reports, sales history records, etc. External sources
include reports from the government, the centraal bureau voor statistiek, supermarket scan-
ner info, scientific literature, books, etc.
The advantages of secondary data are:
o readily available
o rich in detail
o may not cost any more time and effort it takes to search the internet/ go to the library.
The disadvantages include:
o it may lack currency, it’s not up-to-date
o it may lack relevancy
o this data is aggregated, they are reported wholly and not broken down in detail. It
might not be specific enough for the situation.
• Primary data: are new data collected specifically for the research purpose at hand. This can
include gathering information through questionnaires, interviews, etc.
The advantages include:
o the information is specific
o the information is relevant
o data collection can be controlled
Disadvantages include:
o expensive
o costs a lot of time to collect, organize, and analyze
Primary data can be collected through a couple of methods:
• Observation: researchers record people’s behavior, either with or without their knowledge.
When a person is aware of the observation, it’s called obtrusive observation (children playing
with new toys to see how they like them). When a person is not, it’s called unobtrusive obser-
vation (security cameras, traffic pattern tracking). A specialized form of observation is called
participant observation, this occurs when a researcher joins a family or group for an extended
period of time and observes members’ behavior (also: ethnographic research).
• Direct questioning: researchers can collect a wide variety of data, such as group versus indi-
vidual data, brief or long answers, and qualitative versus quantitative data. There are a couple
of direct questioning methods:
o Surveys: a set of structured questions to which a person is asked to respond. Mail and
e-mail surveys are relatively inexpensive, but response rates are low. Phone surveys
have higher response rates, but you can’t ask as many questions. Also, mall intercepts
happen when consumers are spoken to, while shopping, which is convenient, but cus-
tomers will probably not discuss sensitive things face-to-face.
o Interviews: an in-depth interview (IDI) is a one-on-one interview of at least an hour in
length. A highly trained interviewer establishes rapport with a respondent and then
proceeds to lead him through a loosely structured discussion of research topics.
o Focus groups: consists of 6-12 people run by a facilitator who monitors and guides the
group discussion. They are conducted for brainstorming, assessing new products, eval-
uating promotional campaigns, etc.
• Experimentation: manipulate variables in a controlled setting to determine their relationship
to one another. Researchers use experimentation to rule out all but one explanation for an
observation. Experiments involve three types of variables:
o Independent variable: the factors that are changed or manipulated.
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