Consumer behavior

In the 1940s and 50s, marketing was dominated by the so-called classical schools of thought, which were descriptive in nature and relied heavily on approaches based on concrete examples with rare use of interview methods. In the late 1950s, two important reports criticized marketing for the lack of methodological rigor, especially for the inability to accept mathematically oriented methods of research in behavioral sciences ^[1] . The ground was set for marketing to become more interdisciplinary, adopting the concept of consumer behavior.

Since the 1950s, marketing began to shift away from the economy and to other disciplines, in particular, to the behavioral sciences, including sociology, anthropology and clinical psychology . This has led to a new emphasis on the client as a unit of analysis. As a result, substantial new knowledge was added to the marketing discipline, including ideas such as opinion leadership, reference groups, and brand loyalty. Market segmentation , especially demographic segmentation based on the socioeconomic status index (SES) and household life cycle, has also become fashionable. With the addition of consumer behavior, the marketing discipline demonstrates an increasing scientific complexity regarding the development of theory and testing procedures ^[2] .

In the early years, consumer behavior was greatly influenced by research on motivation, which contributed to a better understanding of customers and was widely used by consultants in the advertising industry, as well as in the discipline of psychology in the 1920s, 30s and 40s. By the 1950s, marketing began to apply the methods used by motivation researchers, including in-depth interviews, projective methods, thematic apperceptive tests, and a number of qualitative and quantitative research methods ^[3] . More recently, scientists have added a new set of tools, including ethnography, photoelution techniques and phenomenological interviewing ^[4] . Today, consumer behavior is considered an important discipline in marketing and is included as a training tool in almost all marketing programs for students.

Consumer behavior entails “all actions related to the purchase, use and disposal of goods and services, including the emotional, mental and behavioral reactions of the consumer that precede or follow these actions” ^[5] . The term “consumer” can also refer to individual consumers, as organizational consumers, or rather, “the end user, and not necessarily the buyer, in the distribution chain of goods or services” ^[6] .

Consumer Behavior Associated with ^[7]

• Purchasing activity: purchase of goods or services; how consumers purchase goods and services, as well as all actions leading to a purchasing decision, including information retrieval, evaluation of goods and services, and payment methods, including purchase experience.
• Use or consumption activities, including symbolic associations and the way goods are distributed in families or units of consumption.

• Recycling Activities: concerns the way consumers dispose of products and packaging; may also include resales such as eBay and used markets.

Consumer responses may be ^[8]

• emotional (or affective) reactions: relate to emotions, such as feelings or mood;
• mental (or cognitive) answers: relate to the mental processes of the consumer;
• behavioral (or attendant) responses: refer to the observed consumer responses regarding the purchase and disposal of goods or services.

As a field of study, consumer behavior is an applied social science . An analysis of consumer behavior is “the use of principles of behavior, usually obtained experimentally, to interpret human economic consumption. As a discipline, consumer behavior is at the crossroads of economic psychology and marketing science.