L1+Introduction

= = = - CONSUMER BEHAVIOR - =

LECTURE NOTES, FELU 2009

 * LECTURE 1: Introduction to Consumer Behavior **

What is Consumer Behavior?

The dynamic interaction of affect and cognition, behavior, and the environment by which human beings conduct the consumption aspects of their lives.

1. It involves the thoughts and feelings people experience and the actions they perform in respect to consumption. 2. It includes the interaction of the environment (social in particular) and the individual. Therefore it is context bound (behavior cannot be detached from its physical, social and cultural surroundings) and dynamic (thinking, feelings, actions of consumers, consumer groups and society at large are constantly changing).

The Wheel of Consumer Behavior (Peter & Olson) is critical for developing a complete understanding of consumers and selecting strategies to influence them. It consists of three elements:
 * consumer behavior (overt actions),
 * consumer affect and cognition (feeling, thinking) and
 * consumer environment (physical and social).

Marketing strategy is positioned in the middle of the wheel, because… It is a reciprocal system, as any of the three elements can be either a cause or an effect of a change in the other element.

Consumer analysis can be conducted at various levels: Society (…), industries (…), market segments (…), individuals For example, DOVE…

Consumer studies are multidisciplinary, which means that depending on the point of view (either micro or macro consumer behaviour), different sciences (psychology, sociology, anthropology, economics, ...) can be used for investigating consumer behaviour.

There are three broad approaches to consumer studies:
 * traditional psychological (focusing on individuals),
 * interpretive (focusing on socio-cultural aspects) and
 * economic (using mathematics and statistics to build prediction - and behaviour models).

Consumer behavior knowledge can be used by three groups:
 * Companies
 * Public and non-profit organizations
 * Consumers

The connection between marketing strategy and consumer behavior is …. For businesses understand consumer behavior is important to be able to target their products and their marketing on the right target groups.

As a result, consumer behavior knowledge becomes a sustainable competitive advantage, which means that… Company not pursues their own industry average profitability rather to the superior profitability.

IN-CLASS DISCUSSION: What is the role of consumer behavior in marketing as creating, communicating, delivering, and exchanging offerings that have value? VIDEO: shopping can be painful (stressful, difficult for the elderly

ONLINE DISCUSSION: Is the usual definition of consumption ( "Using up, wasting"... "consumption as the opposite of production") eally useful for describing today's consumers? Take for example the users of YouTube. Do the users shown in [] (short video) really use something up, waste it and destroy it? How would you describe these "new consumers" and their relation to production and corporations? VIDEO: [|The WMG story: A tribute to Youtube users]

E.g. YouTube; Attention Economy (consumers “pay” by perceiving ads).
 * Consumption/Production:** with the previous approaches and discussions, we arrived to the conclusion that between this pair there are new relationships and meanings that need to be explored and taken into account. This gets more striking when internet comes in the scene, when the goods offered or exchanged surpass the boundary of physicality and the label of user and creator is constantly swapped as the flow of value moves from one to the other (Prosumers).