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Summary Consumer Behaviour MCB12806
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Summary of the book Consumer Behaviour by Isabelle Szmigin and Maria Piacentini. Third edition. Written in English. Chapters 1, 2, 4, 5, 6 and 8
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Consumer BehaviourChapter 1:
Conspicuous consumption: the purchasing of luxury items to publicly display wealth to enhance
identity and/or prestige.
The term ‘consumer sovereignty’ was first coined in the 1930s and came to represent the exercise of
freedom that people could have through consumption. Consumer rights organizations also began to
increase. They all share the goal of ensuring that consumers are protected in their marketplace
dealings.
In January 2016, the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) adopted by world leaders at a
historic UN summit in 2015 officially came into force. Over the next 15 years, these will fight
inequalities and tackle climate change.
Exchange value: can be said to represent what the value of a good is to the consumer and therefore
what it could be exchanged for, usually its price.
But postmodernism in the late twentieth century effectively turned the idea of exchange value on its
head. Instead of focusing on the value of the commodity, or even its usefulness, Baudrillard (1981)
suggested that consumers used goods to create and manage their identities.
Similar to exchange value was the idea of use value.
Use value: that is, the value of a good to the consumer in terms of the usefulness it provides. You
might decide not to buy a jacket because it is too expensive, meaning that the exchange value is
higher than its use value to you. Such traditional economic concepts have been undermined by the
now overriding importance for many of sign value, which is the symbolic meaning the consumer
attaches to goods to construct and participate in the social world.
Experiential marketing: focusing on perspectives of consumption rooted in social contexts. In 1982
two women introduced this idea. Their purpose was to shift emphasis from the consumer as rational
decision-maker to a model where the consumer was viewed as an experience-seeker. Their work
aimed to offer a way of analysing and explaining experiential consumption acts in consumer
behaviour terms. Focusing on the consumption of the arts, entertainment, and other leisure activities
as forms of consumer experience (rather than consumer behaviour).
Alongside this development in thinking about consumers as experience-seekers was a shift in how
consumer behaviour was investigated with a move towards greater use of qualitative methods and a
more holistic examination of the factors affecting consumption.
Consumer culture theory (CCT) aims to capture an approach to the study of consumers that
emphasizes the social and cultural aspects of consumption.
Ethnography is a qualitative research method often used in experiential research, aiming to
understand the cultural phenomena reflecting the knowledge and meaning systems associated with
the everyday life of a cultural group. This method aims for deep immersion in the culture of interest.
While the postmodern, experiential, and CCT approaches to consumer behaviour developed from
looking at consumers’ changing social, cultural context, and identity projects, behavioural insights
stem from what some may say are inherent psychological ways in which humans behave. This has led
to the development of a field of study around behavioural insights where the focus is on the contexts
of decisions: environment within which consumption choices take place.
,Researchers in behavioural insights refer to two modes of thinking: automatic and reflective.
Automatic mode: you are operating routinely with the little effort and no feeling of voluntarily being
in control.
Reflective mode: you give effortful attention to a mental activity, and this is often associated with
considered choice and concentration.
Choice architecture: the way a choice is presented influences the choice made.
Mental accounting: is when individuals allocate assets into separate, non-transferable groupings to
which they may assign different levels of utility.
Loss aversion: how we generally dislike losses more than we like gains of an equivalent amount.
Norms: can be defined as informal rules that govern behaviour.
, Chapter 2:
Involvement: is the perceived relevance of a purchase to the consumer.
Some decision-making, such as choosing the career we want to follow, is hugely important as it will
affect many aspects of our life. We refer to these as high-involvement decisions. Other decisions are
of less importance. Such decisions are referred to as love involvement.
the main difference of significance to marketers is that in the high-involvement decision a choice is
made following a process of search and evaluation where some kind of evaluative criteria will be
applied. In the low-involvement decision, the choice is made without these intervening steps.
Obviously, there are shades of grey, and some researchers distinguish between what is referred to as
extended problem-solving (high-involvement) and habitual decision-making (low involvement).
Limited problem-solving occurs in situations where the consumer is less motivated to search for
information or evaluate alternatives in as rigorous a way as they would for an extended problem-
solving choice. In such cases, consumers may use simple evaluation criteria or decision rules such as
‘It must be under £5’ or ‘It must fit into the space in the corner’.
Active learning: involves the acquisition of knowledge before purchase and therefore extensive
information search.
Here, we want to learn more about the brands we are considering buying because the purchase
decision is important to us.
Passive learning: is the acquisition of knowledge without active learning.
Check figure 2.1 (High-involvement and low-involvement decision-making) en table 2.1 (Learning in
low-involvement and high-involvement decision-making) op blz 50.
Check figure 2.2 (Routine decision process in a high-involvement situation) op blz 51.
Evoked set: all brands you are aware of which might meet your needs.
Consideration set: those who you might consider buying.
In a low-involvement process, where there are few differences between brands, a consumer may not
be too concerned about their choices. This could result in inertia, which may manifest itself in
apparent loyalty, for example buying the same brand.
Check table 2.2 (High- and low-involvement purchases).
Different people will exhibit varying levels of involvement with regard to the same product because of
differences in their personality, socio-economic and demographic factors, previous experience, and
the product’s relevance to them and their situation. There are different types of involvement.
- Product involvement: is the perceived personal relevance of the product based on needs,
values, or interest,
- Message-response involvement: reflects the consumer’s interest in marketing
communications.
- Enduring involvement: is ‘the pre-existing relationship between an individual and the object
of concern’.
- Ego involvement: is when consumers perceive products or brands as relevant to their
personal interests.
Involvement is a relationship between the product and the consumer, and that some consumers may
be more involved with a typically low-involvement product field. While personal factors and a long-
term interest in a product may affect our level of involvement, such factors may also change,
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