Consumer Behavior Theory

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1.1Consumer behaviour & consumer decision making The principle assumption upon which the theory of consumer behavior and demand is built is: a consumer attempts to allocate his/her limited money income among available goods and services so as to maximize his/her utility (satisfaction). “the behavior that consumers display in searching for, purchasing, using, evaluating, and disposing of products and services that they expect will satisfy their needs” Consumer decision making has long been of interest to researchers. Beginning about 300 years ago early economists, led by Nicholas Bernoulli, John von Neumann and Oskar Morgenstern, started to examine the basis of consumer decision making (Richarme 2007). This early work approached the topic…show more content…
It was not until the middle of the 21st Century however, that Cognitive Psychology truly emerged as a mainstream and useful field of study with the development of the Stimulus-Organism-Response model by Hebb during the 1950’s (Figure 1.1) (Cziko 2000) and the publication of the landmark text by Ulric Neisser in 1967 (Neisser 1967). From this point many writers suggested that Cognitivism had taken over from Behaviourism as the dominant paradigmatic approach to decision research (Furedy ANDRiley…show more content…
Despite this, however, there are a growing number of academic writers highlighting limitations of the Cognitive approach and publishing new research attempting to further understanding of specific aspects of behaviour. These new approaches can be described as humanistic as they seek to explore concepts introspective to the individual consumer rather than describe generic processes (Stewart 1994). The three most pressing areas for research were identified by Nataraajan & Bagozzi in 1999. Firstly Cognitive approaches rely upon the assumption of the consumer being a rational decision maker, this appears to neglect the role of emotion in decision making. Nataraajan & Bagozzi (1999) comment: ‘There is a pressing need in the field to balance the rational, cognitive side of marketing thought and practice with new ideas and research on the emotional facets of marketing behavior’ (Nataraajan ANDBagozzi 1999 p.
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