Study of individuals, groups, or organisations and all the activities associated with consuming
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. 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. 
Origins of consumer behaviour.
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.
Definition and explanation.
Consumer behaviour means 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:
According to the American Marketing Association, consumer behaviour can be defined as "the dynamic interaction of affect and cognition, behaviour, and environmental events by which human beings conduct the exchange aspects of their lives."
As a field of study, consumer behaviour is an applied social science. Consumer behaviour analysis is the "use of behaviour principles, usually gained experimentally, to interpret human economic consumption." As a discipline, consumer behaviour stands at the intersection of economic psychology and marketing science.
The purchase decision and its context.
Understanding purchase and consumption behaviour is a key challenge for marketers. Consumer behaviour, in its broadest sense, is concerned with understanding both how purchase decisions are made and how products or services are consumed or experienced. Consumers are active decision-makers. They decide what to purchase, often based on their disposable income or budget. They may change their preferences related to their budget and a range of other factors.
Some purchase decisions involve long, detailed processes that include extensive information search to select between competing alternatives. Other purchase decisions, consumers must make highly complex decisions, often based on a lack of time, knowledge or negotiating ability. Such as impulse buys or habitual purchases, are made almost instantaneously with little or no investment of time or effort in information search.
Some purchase decisions are made by groups (such as families, households or businesses) while others are made by individuals. When a purchase decision is made by a small group, such as a household, different members of the group may become involved at different stages of the decision process and may perform different roles. For example, one person may suggest the purchase category, another may search for product-related information while yet another may physically go to the store, buy the product, and transport it home. It is customary to think about the types of decision roles; such as:
For most purchase decisions, each of the decision roles must be performed, but not always by the same individual. For example, in the case of family making a decision about a dining-out venue, a parent may initiate the process by intimating that they are too tired to cook. The children are important influencers in the overall purchase decision, but both parents may act as joint deciders performing a gate-keeping role by vetoing unacceptable alternatives and encouraging more acceptable alternatives. The importance of children as influencers in a wide range of purchase contexts should never be underestimated and the phenomenon is known as pester power.
To approach the mental processes used in purchasing decisions, some authors employ the concept of the black box, which represents the cognitive and affective processes used by a consumer during a purchase decision. The decision model situates the black box in a broader environment which shows the interaction of external and internal stimuli (e.g. consumer characteristics, situational factors, marketing influences, and environmental factors) as well as consumer responses. The black box model is related to the black box theory of behaviourism, where the focus extends beyond processes occurring "inside" the consumer and also includes the "relation" between the stimuli and the consumer's response.
The decision model assumes that purchase decisions do not occur in a vacuum. Rather, they occur in real time and are affected by other stimuli, including external environmental stimuli and the consumer's momentary situation. The elements of the model include interpersonal stimuli (between people) or intrapersonal stimuli (within people), environmental stimuli and marketing stimuli. Marketing stimuli include actions planned and carried out by companies, whereas environmental stimuli include actions or events occurring in the wider operating environment and include social, economic, political, and cultural dimensions. In addition, the buyer's black box includes buyer characteristics and the decision process, which influence the buyer's responses.
Problem recognition.
The first stage of the purchase decision process begins with "problem recognition" (also known as category need or need arousal). This is when the consumer identifies a need, typically defined as the difference between the consumer's current state and their desired or ideal state. A simpler way of thinking about problem recognition is that it is where the consumer decides that they are 'in the market' for a product or service to satisfy some need or want. The strength of the underlying need drives the entire decision process.
Theorists identify three broad classes of problem-solving situation relevant for the purchase decision:
Consumers become aware of a problem in a variety of ways including:
Information search.
During the information search and evaluation stages, the consumer works through processes designed to arrive at a number of brands (or products) that represent viable purchase alternatives. Typically consumers first carry out an internal search and scan their memory for suitable brands. The evoked set is the set of brands that a consumer can elicit from memory and is typically a very small set of some 3- 5 alternatives. Consumers may choose to supplement the number of brands in the evoked set by carrying out an "external search" using sources such as the Internet, manufacturer/brand websites, shopping around, product reviews, referrals from peers and the like. The readiness of information availability has raised the informedness of the consumers: the degree to which they know what is available in the marketplace, with precisely which attributes, and at precisely what price.
The fact that a consumer is aware of a brand does not necessarily mean that it is being considered as a potential purchase. For instance, the consumer may be aware of certain brands, but not favourably disposed towards them (known as the "inept set"). Such brands will typically be excluded from further evaluation as purchase options. For other brands, the consumer may have indifferent feelings (the "inert set"). As the consumer approaches the actual purchase, they distill the mental list of brands into a set of alternatives that represent realistic purchase options, known as the "consideration set". By definition, the consideration set refers to the "small set of brands which a consumer pays close attention to when making a purchase decision". This ultimately leads to a "choice set" which includes the alternatives that are strong contenders for purchase.
Specific brand names enter the consumer's consideration set based on the extent to which they satisfy the consumer's purchasing objectives and/or the salience or accessibility of the brand at the time of making the purchase decision. By implication, brand names that are more memorable are more likely to be accessible. Traditionally, one of the main roles of advertising and promotion was to increase the likelihood that a brand name was included in the consumer's evoked set. Repeated exposure to brand names through intensive advertising was the primary method for increasing "top-of-mind brand awareness". However, the advent of the Internet means that consumers can obtain brand/product information from a multiplicity of different platforms. In practice, the consideration set has assumed greater importance in the purchase decision process because consumers are no longer totally reliant on memory. This is marketing, which could be defined as "the process by which companies create value for customers and build strong customer relationships, in order to capture value from customers in return." This definition strongly implies that the relationship is built upon an exchange and the "creation" of value. This means that a need is built for a consumer, with the product presented or advertised to them through an analytical study of the user's patterns of consumption and their behaviours and habits. The implication for marketers is that relevant brand information should be disseminated as widely as possible and included on any forum where consumers are likely to search for product or brand information, whether traditional media or digital media channels. Thus, marketers require a rich understanding of the typical consumer's touchpoints.
Evaluation of alternatives.
Consumer evaluation can be viewed as a distinct stage. Alternatively, evaluation may occur continuously throughout the entire decision process. Consumers evaluate alternatives in terms of the functional (also called "utilitarian") and psycho-social (also called the "value-expressive" or the "symbolic") benefits offered.
Brand image (or brand personality) is an important psycho-social attribute. Consumers can have both positive and negative beliefs about a given brand. A considerable body of research suggests that consumers are predisposed towards brands with a personality that matches their own and that a good match can affect brand preference, brand choice, satisfaction with a brand, brand commitment and loyalty, and the consumer's propensity to give positive word-of-mouth referrals. The branch of consumer behaviour that investigates the matching of a brand's personality and the consumer's personality is known as "self-congruity research." The social media presence of a brand plays a huge part in this stage, with the effect