This document provides an overview of consumer behavior as a field of study. It defines consumer behavior as the study of how individuals select, purchase, use, and dispose of products and services. Consumer behavior involves complex processes and is influenced by many factors, including marketing activities. The field draws from diverse disciplines and can be studied from different perspectives, such as using positivist or interpretivist approaches. Understanding consumer behavior allows marketers to better segment markets and tailor their strategies. The document outlines some of the key topics that will be covered in the book.

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Chapter 1
Consumers Rule
By Michael R. Solomon
Consumer Behavior
Buying, Having, and Being
Sixth Edition

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• What useful ways can marketers categorize
Gail as a consumer?
• How do others influence Gail’s purchase
decisions?
• What role did brand play in Gail’s surfing
habits?
• What other factors influence Gail’s evaluation
of products?
Opening Vignette: Gail

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What is Consumer Behavior?
• Consumer Behavior:
– The study of the processes involved when individuals or
groups select, purchase, use, or dispose of products,
services ideas, or experiences to satisfy needs and desires
• Role Theory:
– Identifies consumers as actors on the marketplace stage
• Consumer Behavior is a Process:
– Exchange: A transaction in which two or more
organizations give and receive something of value

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Some Issues That Arise During Stages in
the Consumption Process
Figure 1.1

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Consumer Behavior Involves
Many Different Actors
• Consumer:
– A person who identifies a need or desire, makes a
purchase, and then disposes of the product
• Many people may be involved in this sequence of
events.
– Purchaser / User / Influencer
• Consumers may take the form of organizations
or groups.

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Consumers’ Impact on
Marketing Strategy
• Market Segmentation:
– Identifies groups of consumers who are similar to
one another in one or more ways and then devises
marketing strategies that appeal to one or more
groups
• Demographics:
– Statistics that measure observable aspects of a
population
• Ex.: Age, Gender, Family Structure, Social Class
and Income, Race and Ethnicity, Lifestyle, and
Geography

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A Lesson Learned
• Nike was forced to pull
this advertisement for a
running shoe after
disabilities rights groups
claimed the ads were
offensive.
• How could Nike have
done a better job of
getting its message
across without offending
a powerful demographic?

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Market Segmentation
Finely-tuned marketing
segmentation strategies
allow marketers to
reach only those
consumers likely to be
interested in buying
their products.

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Consumers’ Impact on
Marketing Strategy (cont.)
• Relationship Marketing: Building
Bonds with Consumers
– Relationship marketing:
• The strategic perspective that stresses the long-term,
human side of buyer-seller interactions
– Database marketing:
• Tracking consumers’ buying habits very closely, and
then crafting products and messages tailored
precisely to people’s wants and needs based on this
information

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Marketing’s Impact on Consumers
• Marketing and Culture:
– Popular Culture:
• Music, movies, sports, books, celebrities, and other
forms of entertainment consumed by the mass
market.
– Marketers play a significant role in our view of the
world and how we live in it.

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Popular Culture
Companies often create product icons to develop an
identity for their products. Many made-up creatures and
personalities, such as Mr. Clean, the Michelin tire man and
the Pillsbury Doughboy, are widely recognized figures in
popular culture.

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Marketing’s Impact on Consumers: The
Meaning of Consumption
• The Meaning of Consumption:
– People often buy products not for what they do,
but for what they mean.
– Types of relationships a person may have with a
product:
• Self-concept attachment
• Nostalgic attachment
• Interdependence
• Love

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Marketing’s Impact on Consumers: The
Meaning of Consumption (cont.)
• Consumption includes intangible
experiences, ideas and services in
addition to tangible objects.
• Four types of Consumption Activities:
– Consuming as experience
– Consuming as integration
– Consuming as classification
– Consuming as play

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Marketing’s Impact on Consumers: The
Global Consumer
• By 2006, the majority of people on earth
will live in urban centers.
• Sophisticated marketing strategies
contribute to a global consumer culture.
• Even smaller companies look to expand
overseas.
• Globalization has resulted in varied
perceptions of the United States (both
positive and negative).

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The Global Consumer
American products like Levi jeans are in
demand around the world.

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Marketing’s Impact on Consumers:
Virtual Consumption
• The Digital Revolution is one of the most
significant influences on consumer behavior.
• Electronic marketing increases convenience
by breaking down the barriers of time and
location.
• U-commerce:
– The use of ubiquitous networks that will slowly but surely
become part of us (i.e., wearable computers, customized
advertisements beamed to cell phones, etc.)
• Cyberspace has created a revolution in C2C
(consumer-to-consumer) activity.

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Blurred Boundaries
Marketing and Reality
• Marketers and consumers coexist in a
complicated two-way relationship.
• It’s increasingly difficult for consumers to
discern the boundary between the
fabricated world and reality.
• Marketing influences both popular culture
and consumer perceptions of reality.

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Blurred Boundaries
Marketing managers
often borrow imagery
from other forms of
popular culture to
connect with an
audience. This line of
syrups adapts the “look”
of a pulp detective
novel.

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Marketing Ethics and Public Policy
• Business Ethics:
– Rules of conduct that guide actions in the
marketplace
– The standards against which most people in the
culture judge what is right and what is wrong, good
or bad
• Notions of right and wrong differ among
people, organizations, and cultures.

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Needs and Wants:
Do Marketers Manipulate Consumers?
• Consumerspace
• Do marketers create artificial needs?
– Need: A basic biological motive
– Want: One way that society has taught us that need can be
satisfied
• Are advertising and marketing necessary?
– Economics of information perspective: Advertising is an
important source of consumer information.
• Do marketers promise miracles?
– Advertisers simply don’t know enough to manipulate
people.

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• This ad was created
by the American
Association of
Advertising Agencies
to counter charges
that ads create
artificial needs.
• Do you agree with the
premise of the ad?
Why or why not?
Discussion Question

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Public Policy and Consumerism
• Consumer efforts in the U.S. have contributed
to the establishment of federal agencies to
oversee consumer-related activities.
– Department of Agriculture
– Federal Trade Commission
– Food and Drug Administration
– Securities and Exchange Commission
– Environmental Protection Agency
• Culture Jamming:
– A strategy to disrupt efforts by the corporate world to
dominate our cultural landscape

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The Consumer Product Safety Commission

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Culture Jamming
• Adbusters Quarterly
is a Canadian
magazine devoted to
culture jamming. This
mock ad skewers
Benetton.

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Consumerism and
Consumer Research
• Kennedy’s “Declaration of Consumer Rights”
(1962)
• Green Marketing:
– When a firm chooses to protect or enhance the natural
environment as it goes about its activities
• Reducing wasteful packaging
• Donations to charity
• Social Marketing:
– Using marketing techniques to encourage positive activities
(e.g. literacy) and to discourage negative activities (e.g.
drunk driving)

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Consumer Related Issues
• UNICEF sponsored this advertising campaign against child labor.
The field of consumer behavior plays a role in addressing important
consumer issues such as child exploitation.

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The Dark Side of
Consumer Behavior
• Consumer Terrorism:
– An example: Susceptibility of the nation’s food
supply to bioterrorism
• Addictive Consumption:
– Consumer addiction:
• A physiological and/or psychological dependency on
products or services
• Compulsive Consumption:
– Repetitive shopping as an antidote to tension,
anxiety, depression, or boredom

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The Dark Side of
Consumer Behavior (cont.)
• Consumed Consumers:
– People who are used or exploited, willingly or not, for
commercial gain in the marketplace
• Illegal Activities:
– Consumer Theft:
• Shrinkage: The industry term for inventory and cash
losses from shoplifting and employee theft
– Anticonsumption:
• Events in which products and services are
deliberately defaced or mutilated

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Consumer Behavior
As a Field of Study
• Consumer behavior only recently a
formal field of study
• Interdisciplinary influences on the
study of consumer behavior
– Consumer behavior studied by researchers from
diverse backgrounds
– Consumer phenomena can be studied in different
ways and on different levels

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Journal of Consumer Research

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The Pyramid of Consumer Behavior
Figure 1.2

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Consumer Behavior Disciplines
• The Issue of Strategic Focus
– Should CB have a strategic focus or be studied as a
pure social science?
• The Issue of Two Perspectives on
Consumer Research
– Positivism (modernism):
• Paradigm that emphasizes the supremacy of human
reason and the objective search for truth through
science
– Interpretivism (postmodernism):
• Paradigm that emphasizes the importance of
symbolic, subjective experience and meaning is in
the mind of the person

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Positivist vs. Interpretivist Approaches to CB

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Taking it From Here:
The Plan of the Book
• Section I – Consumer Behavior
• Section II – Consumers as Individuals
• Section III – Consumers as Decision Makers
• Section IV – Consumers and Subcultures
• Section V – Consumers and Culture

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The Wheel of Consumer Behavior
Figure 1.3