Consumer behaviour OE 104 Exam: 1 April
Chapter 1 Part 1: Historical and current perspectives on
consumption
| 1 A historical context for understanding consumption
Marketing practitioners and policy-makers need to understand consumer behaviour. The
need for organizations to recognize the factors that shape and influence people’s behaviour
in different environments is important in the marketing concept. Businesses want to
understand how and why consumers shop and consume in the ways they do both to develop
products and to effectively communicate with customers. The relationship between
production and consumption is one of the most important aspects of marketing. Companies
produce goods and services for people to buy; in order to buy, consumers have to see value
in these goods and services, so that they are prepared to exchange money for them.
An interesting aspect of early consumption was the development of sumptuary laws; laws
that attempt to ‘regulate expenditure, especially with a view to restraining excess in food,
dress, equipage, etc.’. These laws are a manifestation of an important theme found in many
studies of consumer behaviour that centre around the idea of the ‘right’ or the ‘best’ way to
consume.
The sign or symbolic value is the symbolic meaning consumers attach to goods to construct
and participate in the social world. Sometimes represent the exchange value of an item not
the use value, but the sign value is probably higher. The fetishism of commodities is the
disguising or masking of commodities whereby the appearance of goods hides the story of
those who made them and how they made them. Consumption function maps the
relationship between disposable income and level of wages.
While product innovation has meant that consumers have more and better products to
choose from, it has also led to what is often termed planned or built-in obsolescence where
a product has a limited lifespan and is regularly replaced with new versions.
An important feature of department stores was that the customer became anonymous.
Previously, in local shops and markets, the customers where know to the store owner. There
is a difference between ‘doing’ and ‘going’ shopping: doing shopping involves definite
articles, a necessary task; going shopping is out of the way, open-ended, a diversion.
Increasingly technological advances are helping to innovate how we shop.
Buying online has never been easier, but it also lacks the visual experience of being in a
store. Here comes virtual reality into its element. A limited product creates a simple sense of
urgency among their customers.
An important aspect of Freud’s psychoanalytic research was that he suggested that people’s
behaviour was often determined by irrational and unconscious motives and by socialized
inhibitions. Freud believed that unconscious thoughts were as important as conscious ones.
, Consumer rights organizations share the goal of ensuring that consumers are protected in
their marketplace dealings. Producers and retailers have a responsibility to the consumer
not only in producing goods but in ensuring that they are safe, fair and of the value
promised.
Consumer type Description
Chooser The rational problem-solving consumer, requiring genuine options, finance options
and information.
Communicator Uses goods to communicate. Material objects are used for the messages they
convey, often relating to status or taste.
Explorer Consumers increasingly have places to explore, and often we explore with little
idea of what, or even if, we wish to buy.
Identity-seeker Creating and maintaining personal and social identity through consumption.
Hedonist/artist Consumption as pleasure: it can fulfil needs for emotional aesthetic pleasure and
fantasy.
Victim The exploited consumer: the consumer may lack knowledge or be unaware of
choices, or they may have limited choice because of their socio-economic situation.
Rebel Using products in new ways a conscious rebellion
Activist Presented historically from the cooperative movement, fighting against corporate
greed and political activism.
Citizen Consumers are also citizens with rights and responsibilities.
‘Flawed’ consumer = someone who is effectively excluded from consumer society because of
their economic or social position.
Dagevos proposed 4 consumer ‘images’ which
are based on 2 key dimensions;
materialistic/non=materialistic and
individualistic/collectivist.
- Calculating is rational, mainstream,
efficient and effective.
- Traditional is conformist, cost-
conscious, self-disciplined, fearful of
new things, community-oriented.
- Unique is fun and impulsive, seeks
variety, seeks status, distinction and
new things.
- Responsible is captured by involvement, altruistic.
Consumer typologies are useful in terms of recognizing differences buy a few have been
based on empirical research and therefore you must be circumspect (terughoudend) in their
application.
An important feature of postmodern consumers is their fragmented nature. Rather than
being one ‘type’, the postmodern consumer truly crosses many types and it’s difficult to tell
when he/she will be one or the other. Postmodern consumers don’t seek a unified theme
but want to explore different and separate identities to match the fragmenting markets and
the proliferation of products.
,Today, use value is of less significance, and instead it is the sign and hedonic value
communicated through wearing a high-fashion brand that is important for consumers.
Central to understanding of contemporary postmodern consumers is the assumption that
we live in a complex social and cultural world, and that meaning is individuality created
based on our shared experiences.
Don’t forget to think about how different social science perspectives lead to different
approaches to studying consumer behaviour. The main perspectives we see in consumer
research relate to:
- Anthropology: tends to focus consumers’ behaviours and practices, looking at how
rituals, myths, and symbols all contribute to understanding the meaning and
significance of consumption to consumers.
- Sociology: contributes insights into the social forces that influence individual and
group consumption.
- Psychology (the most influential social science): the scientific study of mental
processes and behaviours.
- Economics: micro-economic theory is used to explain some aspects of how we
process information and make decisions. Macroeconomics provides indicators of
consumption behaviours that are very useful in understanding global differences in
consumptions.
- History and geography help in our understanding of the origins and development of
consumer culture.
Two broad research orientations:
1. The positivist approach: the objectivity of science and the consumer as a rational
decision-maker. This approach sees the world as having an external objective reality,
and the goal of research using this perspective is to understand consumers in terms
of theories that have been rigorously tested and can explain this external reality.
2. The interpretivist approach stresses the subjective meaning of the consumer’s
individual experience and the idea that any behaviour is subject to multiple
interpretations rather than one single explanation. This approach is driven by a need
to develop a deep understanding of people’s lives and behaviours. Reality is socially
constructed.
Motivational research has been important for studying consumer behaviour as it recognized
that not all consumer decisions can be explained by rational or economic arguments.
| 2 Contemporary perspectives on consumer behaviour
Behavioural economic focuses on the context or decisions. The behavioural economic
perspective recognized different modes (or ways) of behaving, and how these influence our
behaviour in different ways.
Researches in behavioural economics refer to 2 modes of thinking:
1. Automatic you are operating routinely with little effort and no feeling of
voluntarily being in control. (Smiling when seeing a baby)
, 2. Reflective you give effortful attention to a mental activity, and this is often
associated with considered choice and concentration. It takes effort and
concentration.
The automatic mode is more involved with the context of a situation (pick up a bar of
chocolate at the check-out), the reflective mode represents the cognitive information-
processing aspect of decision making. You can switch from the automatic mode to the
reflective mode.
Choice architecture describes how the way a choice is presented influences the choice made.
Example is the houseflies in urinals at Schiphol. Also showed as a football goal. A man has
something to aim at, which reduce mess.
Important aspects of consumer behaviour:
- Mental accounting is when individuals allocate assets into separate, non-transferable
groupings to which they may assign different levels of utility. How people save
provides a good example of mental accounting. Mental accounting can help us feel
more secure.
- Loss aversion refers to how we generally dislike losses more than we like gains of an
equivalent amount. Not reaching a goal can also act as a loss.
- Norms can be defined as informal rules that govern behaviour. Norms refer to the
kinds of behaviour that we see around us and consider to be appropriate. Norms are
generally known in a social or cultural group. Social influence through information or
peer pressure can impact norms. Peer pressure works when we care what others
think about us; go along with the crowd to stay in their favour. Norms can work both
positively and negatively.
- A default is a preselected option without active choice.
- Priming is the alteration of people’s behaviour outside their conscious awareness as
a result of their first being exposed to certain sights, words, sensations or activities
priming people with certain cues without their being conscious of this happening can
change behaviour or feelings.
If you think about the things that you enjoy doing, you can start to see how central the idea
of experience is to these activities. Marketeers need to think about how they can stop bad
experiences just as much as creating new and novel ones.
The problem with direct asking is that we find out what people think but not necessarily
what they do. Respondents may also give answers they w=think are acceptable to the
researcher. Neuromarketing is a relatively new field of marketing research which uses brain-
imaging techniques to identify brain activity through changes in blood flow. It identifies the
choices the brain is making without the social, rationalizing, or other activities. It’s the
application of neuroscientific methods to analyse and understand human behaviour in
relation to market and marketing exchanges. It is virtually impossible to find a purely
objective response to brands because our brains also process the imagery that has been
built up around it.
