Consumer behaviour

Consumer behaviour is the study of individuals, groups, or organisations and all activities associated with the purchase, use and disposal of goods and services. It encompasses how the consumer's emotions, attitudes, and preferences affect buying behaviour, and how external cues—such as visual prompts, auditory signals, or tactile (haptic) feedback—can shape those responses. Consumer behaviour emerged in the 1940–1950s as a distinct sub-discipline of marketing, but has become an interdisciplinary social science that blends elements from psychology, sociology, social anthropology, anthropology, ethnography, ethnology, marketing, and economics (especially behavioural economics).

The study of consumer behaviour formally investigates individual qualities such as demographics, personality lifestyles, and behavioural variables (like usage rates, usage occasion, loyalty, brand advocacy, and willingness to provide referrals), in an attempt to understand people's wants and consumption patterns. Consumer behaviour also investigates on the influences on the consumer, from social groups such as family, friends, sports, and reference groups, to society in general (brand-influencers, opinion leaders).

Due to the unpredictability of consumer behavior, marketers and researchers use ethnography, consumer neuroscience, and machine learning, along with customer relationship management (CRM) databases, to analyze customer patterns. The extensive data from these databases allows for a detailed examination of factors influencing customer loyalty, re-purchase intentions, and other behaviors like providing referrals and becoming brand advocates. Additionally, these databases aid in market segmentation, particularly behavioral segmentation, enabling the creation of highly targeted and personalized marketing strategies.

In the 1940s and 1950s, 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. The stage was set for marketing to become more inter-disciplinary by adopting a consumer-behaviourist perspective.

From the 1950s, marketing began to shift its 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, 1930s, and 1940s. 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. In addition to these, contemporary research has delved further into the complexities of consumer behavior, incorporating innovative approaches such as neuroimaging studies and big data analytics. These modern tools provide deeper insights into subconscious consumer motivations and decision-making processes. 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.

Consumer behaviour entails "all 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." The term consumer can refer to individual consumers as well as organisational consumers, and more specifically, "an end user, and not necessarily a purchaser, in the distribution chain of a good or service." Consumer behaviour is concerned with:

Consumer responses may be: