consumer behavior

Consumer behavior is the study and analysis of individuals, groups, and/or organizations focusing on the activities associated with the use, purchase, and disposal of products and services, including the consumer’s emotional, attitudinal, and behavioral responses that precede or follow these activities. It emerged in the 1940s and the 1950s as a distinct subdiscipline in marketing and economic studies. Consumer behavior examines how emotions, attitudes, and preferences affect consumption, time allocation, and ultimate buying behavior. The profiling of individual consumers and/or households with variables such as age, gender, income, usage rates, time allocation, preferences, loyalty, and brand advocacy, among others, is implemented in an attempt to understand people’s preferences and consumption patterns and ultimately use these data to create market and consumer reports.

In the 21st century’s dynamic, competitive, and revolving marketplace, marketing and media research specialists need to be fully informed about consumer patterns—what their needs, preferences, and motivations are; what they think; how, where, and when do they work/entertain themselves; and primarily how they allocate their money and time. Identifying the influencing forces that affect consumer decisions is a key issue in anticipating preferences and consequently programming products and services that comply with earlier choices. Consumer behavior is an interdisciplinary social science that integrates elements from macro-micro-behavioral economics, marketing, psychology, sociology, social anthropology, ethnography, and the disciplines of computing and communication studies (specifically its intersection with algorithmic-big data and advanced neuroscientific social analysis). This entry provides an overview of consumer behavior, including its relationship to mass media and information technology (IT); its origins, definition, and explanation; and its relationship to the purchasing decision, black box model, and relevant research.

Mass Media and IT

The study of consumer behavior in the mass media and IT sector is concerned with all aspects of consumption and buying behavior as well as rating analysis and market indicator construction. It also addresses all individuals involved, either directly or indirectly in the consumer value chain, in purchasing decisions and consumption activities including brand influencers and opinion leaders. Consumer research science has shown limitations in predicting behavior with the only traditional nondigital data sets. However, new research methods such as consumer neuroscience and consumer big data analysis, including mobile devices sensor analysis, are providing new data and insights on how consumers make decisions in the different audiovisual markets. This enables an increased accuracy in analysis and prediction of consumer behavior models.

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Customer relationship management databases have become an asset for the analysis of customer behavior in the mass media and IT industries. The immense data produced by these databases enable a detailed examination of behavioral factors with algorithmic and modeled analysis which may contribute to accurately predicting customer repurchase intentions, increment consumer retention, and loyalty and detect other behavioral intentions such as the willingness to provide positive referrals, become brand advocates, or engage in customer-related activities.

Origins of Consumer Behavior

Formal studies of consumer behavior date to the 1940s when marketing was dominated by the so-called classical schools of thought that were highly descriptive in their approaches and relied primarily on case study analysis with only occasional use of interviewing methodologies. Researchers have criticized marketing for its lack of methodological rigor during this period, especially in the failure to adopt mathematically oriented behavioral science research methods. The stage was set for marketing to become more interdisciplinary by adopting a scientific consumer-behaviorist perspective.

From the 1950s, marketing began to shift its reliance partially away from economics and toward other academic disciplines, mainly the behavioral sciences, including sociology, anthropology, and psychology. This resulted in a new emphasis on the consumer as a unit of analysis. Market segmentation, especially demographic segmentation based on age, loci, socioeconomic status index, and household life cycle, also became frequent in market analysis. With the methodological refinement of consumer behavior, the marketing around behavioral analysis reached increasing scientific sophistication with respect to theory development and testing procedures.

In the 1950s, the study of consumer behavior was heavily influenced by motivation research, which had increased the understanding of customers, and had been used by consultants in the advertising industry primarily in the United States and Europe. In the 1950s, marketing also began to use techniques traditionally used by motivation researchers including depth interviews, group interviews, projective techniques, thematic apperception tests, and other mixed qualitative and/or quantitative research methods approaches. Since the 2000s, researchers have added a new set of tools, including ethnographic in-site analysis, image and video codification techniques, phenomenological interviewing, and big data collecting techniques. Consumer behavior is a consolidated subdiscipline within economic and marketing analysis schools and is included as a core class in almost all economic and/or marketing bachelor’s and specific master’s programs.

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Definition and Explanation

Consumer behavior comprises all activities associated with the use, purchase, and ultimate disposal of products and services, including the consumer’s psychological and behavioral responses which may be associated with the consumption chain. In any given research study, consumer may either refer to an individual or to a group of individuals. Consumer behavior is primarily concerned with the following activities:

Purchase activities: It focuses on the purchase of products or services and how consumers acquire products and services as well as all the actions and relations leading up to a purchase decision, including information search, evaluation of goods and services, and payment methods including the purchase experience.

Use or consumption activities: It concerns the who, where, when, and how of consumption and the usage experience, including the symbolic associations and the way in which goods are distributed within families or consumption units.

Disposal activities: It concerns the way that consumers dispose of products and packaging, both physical and digital, and may also include reselling activities, borrowing, and sharing in the physical and digital markets.

The Purchase Decision and Its Context in the Mass Media

Understanding purchasing and consumption behavior is a key challenge for marketers in the media industries. Consumer behavior is concerned with understanding both how buying decisions are made and how products or services are consumed or experienced. Consumers are active decision makers: They decide what to purchase based on their disposable income, time, and the information available.

Some purchase decisions, such as those related to long-term audiovisual subscriptions, or high value audiovisual goods, may involve lengthy, detailed processes which may include an extensive information search in order to select among competing alternative providers. Other purchase decisions, such as impulse acquisitions or recurrent purchases, are made almost instantaneously with little or no investment of time or effort in information search. Mobile devices have significantly increased impulse purchases among younger generations.

Some purchase decisions are made by groups (e.g., families, households, businesses), while others are made by individuals. When a purchase decision is made by a small group, such as a household, different individuals of the group may become involved at the various stages of the decision-making process and may perform complementary roles. 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 finally use it.

The Purchasing Decision Model

In understanding the cognitive processes used in purchasing decisions, some researchers have employed the concept of the black box, a metaphorical construction used to describe the cognitive and affective processes used by a consumer during a buying decision. The decision model positions the black box in a broader scenario that shows the interaction of external and internal stimuli as well as consumer responses. The black box model is related to the black box theory of behaviorism, where the focus extends beyond processes occurring inside the consumer, including the relation between the stimuli variables and the consumer’s response.

The decision model assumes that purchase decisions do not occur in isolation. On the contrary, they occur in real time and are affected by other stimuli, including external environmental variables and the consumer’s time-set allocation patterns. The elements of the model include interpersonal stimuli (between people) or intrapersonal stimuli (within people), environmental stimuli, and marketing stimuli. Marketing stimuli relates to actions planned and carried out by enterprises or institutions, whereas environmental stimuli include inputs occurring in the enlarged scenario and include social factors as well as economic, political, technological, and cultural dimensions. In addition, the buyer’s black box includes buyer characteristics and the decision process, which influence the buyer’s responses to products, services, and information stimuli.

Mass Media and Internet Consumer Behavior

Mass media online consumption is significantly different from off-line and/or physically present consumer behavior. As a consequence, researchers have adequately indicated that studying online consumer behavior may require newly adapted methodologies and evolved theoretical approaches. In the case of online consumption and purchasing, buyers derive satisfaction from their ability to navigate a website or an app and the convenience of online searching which allows them to compare prices and ultimately buy/consume with immediacy.

Consumers may use online platforms for various stages of the purchase decision. Some consumers use online sources simply to acquire information about planned purchases. Others use the Internet for making the actual purchase. In yet other situations, consumers may use online platforms to engage in post-purchase behaviors such as staying connected with a brand provider by joining a community or by becoming a brand advocate by actively posting a product review or providing brand referrals online. A specific incident that some technological providers have encountered is that consumers who seek information online may turn to physical retailers for the actual physical product purchase. The mass media industries are experiencing a consumer behavior revolution in the physical and digital sphere where consumption anywhere and anytime is transforming the traditional market value chain.

Research Methods and Implementation

To gain insights into consumer behavior, researchers use the standard battery of market research methods such as surveys, depth interviews, and focus groups. Since 2010, researchers are turning to newer methodologies and technologies in an effort to seek a deeper and almost immediate understanding of consumer patterns. These newer methods include ethnographic-anthropological research (also known as participant observation), neuroscience, and experimental lab designs. In addition, researchers often turn to separate disciplines for insights with potential to inform the study of consumer behavior. For instance, behavioral economics, algorithmic data analysis, and neuroscience lab modeling are adding new insights into certain aspects of consumer behavior.

As a field of study, consumer behavior is an applied social science that is central to the mass media and Internet-oriented industries. Consumer behavior analysis collects data and interprets human economic consumption patterns with the intent of gaining an understanding of the complex processes affecting media consumption patterns. As a discipline, consumer behavior stands at the intersection of macro- and micro-economic analysis, behavioral consumer psychology, and consumer marketing analysis.

Audience Research and Media Research Companies

Enterprises such as Kantar, Comscore, Nielsen, GfK, and Ipsos, among others, are regular providers of reports and insight for the media industries at a national or regional level. Global media and IT players, including Amazon, Google’s parent company Alphabet, Meta, Apple, Netflix, and Spotify, are establishing advanced consumer behavior and big data analysis departments and technology in an effort to acquire, curate, and use consumer behavior data that will allow them to monetize their respective strategic business plans.

Consumer neuroscience has increasingly played a role in consumer behavior analysis from the 2000s onward. It employs sophisticated biometric sensors, including wearable gadgets and personal devices, technologies such as electroencephalography, functional magnetic resonance imaging, and image tracking, to study the ways that consumers respond to specific stimuli such as product displays, product consumption, brands, packaging information, or other marketing signals. Consumer neuroscience has become a mainstream component of consumer research methods in the mass media sector.

The original version of this article was published by SAGE Publications in The SAGE International Encyclopedia of Mass Media and Society.