Question

What are the different approaches to the study of consumer behaviour?

Answer 1

Consumers possess considerable discretion to make independent and autonomous choices about what they will and will not buy, from whom they will buy, as well as from whom they will not, and this purchasing power leaves most businesses that are not monopolies little choice but to adopt a consumer orientation, meaning that they must resolutely focus on understanding customers in order to more effectively fulfil their needs (Baker & Hart, 2003). Specifically, in marketing, a good understanding of customers' lives to the maximum extent possible is crucial to ensuring that the most appropriate products and services are being marketed to the right people in the most effective way possible (Kotler & Keller, 2012).

Influencing consumers' behaviour, and in particular their purchasing decisions, is at the focal point of all the effort and resources that are devoted to marketing (Kotler & Armstrong, 2014) and because of this fact, marketers will require an in depth understanding of the principles and motivations behind consumers' behaviour if they expect to be able to effectively anticipate, forecast and perhaps even instigate what consumers will do in the future (Baker & Hart, 2003). According to Jobber and Fahy (2006), it is nearly impossible to succeed at marketing without an in-depth understanding of how and why consumers behave in the ways that they do and therefore, it is unsurprising that consumer behaviour and the ways in which consumers make decisions, particularly purchasing decisions, are prominent research topics and have been studied extensively in the various fields of consumer science (Erasmus, Boshoff, & Rousseau, 2001).

The first attempts at understanding consumer behaviour were based on the assumptions typically made in orthodox economics, that in a world of scarce resources, economic actors or 'economic men', are primarily motivated to reconcile the inevitable tension between unlimited needs and limited resources (Keizer, 2010) and that all behaviour results from rational decision making in the pursuit of purely self-regarding choices (Camerer & Fehr, 2006). For instance, a consumer presented with the same product at different prices, all other things being equal, will almost certainly choose the option which has the lower price. This approach assumes that consumers are always consciously aware of all their true preferences, ranked in order of priority and social factors are assumed to be irrelevant in interpersonal relations, which are assumed to be primarily motivated by economics (Keizer, 2010). In essence, the 'economic men' approach considers consumers' behaviour to be motivated primarily by the rational pursuit of optimum economic benefit.