Consumer Behaviour

Perspectives, Findings and Explanations

John O'Shaughnessy

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781350305229
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Betriebswirtschaft
• Subtopic: Konsumverhalten

A high level textbook discussing different perspectives in consumer behaviour. Drawing on real life case studies, this book enables students to critically approach and evaluate behavioural concepts.

Chapter 1

Introduction: Perspectivism and Other Basic Notions for Understanding the Nature of the Social Sciences

UNDERSTANDING CONSUMER BEHAVIOR

Marketing makes myriad assumptions about human behavior, whether that behavior is consumer behavior, the behavior of channel intermediaries or the behavior of competitors. The focus in this book is on the consumer, whether called client, patient or just customer, who goes about reflecting on what to buy and how to use the product. Most of the assumptions that marketers make regarding their customers are based on experience, for example that their customers are sensitive to price or that certain consumer habits (such as watching television) will continue. But there are other assumptions that rely on a deeper understanding of consumer behavior to even appreciate what is being assumed or to help settle disputes about the validity of claims made. This book helps in gaining that understanding of consumer behavior. This is not to downplay the role of the marketing manager’s experience. Experience is like history in providing lessons or analogies to justify entertaining certain hypotheses or understanding a set of events but experience supplemented by social science perspectives, concepts and findings is likely to lead to greater consumer understanding.

BEHAVIORAL SCIENCE CONCEPTS

The book describes the perspectives social scientists espouse to study people’s behavior as well as reporting findings on consumer behavior. Social science concepts draw attention to categories of behavior that might otherwise be overlooked. They also provide a vocabulary for expressing our thoughts on what is going on – a new vocabulary that helps us understand consumers better. Without knowledge of such concepts, discussion of buyer behavior is impoverished.

In reading about consumer behavior or studying research reports that include sections on consumer behavior, managers should understand where the author is coming from by being able to identify the author’s basic stance or perspective on behavior. This is because different social science perspectives represent different windows into problems or answer different questions about behavior, and are not necessarily in competition. This is not to suggest that social science perspectives are set in stone, since each generation of social scientists is apt to give a retrospective reading of their own perspective to judge progress in tracking truth and identifying progressive changes that might be made. But when the adoption of a perspective blinds us to other perspectives, that perspective can take on the mantle of an ideology. Thus Hilary Rose, a sociologist of science, and Steven Rose, a neuroscientist (2011), have this to say in reviewing a book on the science of sex differences:

But what shouts loudest in all these studies is the ways in which the researchers’ preconceptions of what counts as appropriate male or female behavior shapes their research. Girls (and apparently even infant female vervet monkeys) are supposed to prefer pots and pans and dolls to trucks and Meccano. When girls turned out to be as interested as boys in playing with a construction kit called Lincoln Logs, a Lego airplane was substituted instead. It is hard to avoid the conclusion that these studies tell one more about the prevailing ideology of the researchers than about their subjects.

(Rose and Rose 2011)

GENERAL QUESTIONS RAISED ABOUT CONSUMER BEHAVIOR

Every marketing manager has an interest in questions such as the following and the social sciences offer at least partial answers:

1. How can we best view the consumer?
2. What types of influence affect behavior?
3. What characteristics or dispositional states of the buyer affect the impact of those influences?
4. What mental processes are involved in intentional actions like buying?
5. How rational is the buyer?

How we answer such questions, or whether we are even willing to ask them, depends somewhat on the particular perspective adopted.

PERSPECTIVISM AND PERSPECTIVES

Fay (1996) describes perspectivism as the claim that there can be no intellectual activity without an organizing conceptual scheme that reflects a perspective. A perspective provides a lens through which to interpret what is going on and what action might be taken. Every deliberated decision is tied to a perspective. Alan Greenspan, former chairman of the Federal Reserve, in describing the free market ideology as a well-developed and all-encompassing way of thinking about the world, was in fact describing the particular economic perspective he endorsed. The notion of arguing from a perspective is reflected in remarks like: ‘It all depends on your viewpoint’ or ‘That’s a different way of looking at it’. The notion of being guided in our thinking by the perspective adopted rejects the claim of there being just one true picture of social reality.

Perspective can determine what facts to collect and how things are to be interpreted. Take an example from history, namely the 1857–8 uprising in India against the British. Rosie Llewellyn-Jones (2007) points to the many ‘causes’ that are quoted to explain the uprising: a peasant revolt (based on a Marxist perspective); unfair treatment of the sepoy (the soldier-historian’s perspective); the changing role of the East India Company (the political historian’s perspective); the changing balance of trade (the economic historian’s perspective); the Evangelical movement originating in Britain (the social historian’s perspective). These different perspectives give rise to the selection of different ‘facts’, while coloring interpretations of the facts selected.

If a perspective embodies theoretical presumptions, then that perspective constitutes a scientific paradigm. The term ‘scientific paradigm’ in the philosophy of science equates with a science’s theoretical orientation or theoretical perspective, such as when we speak of the Freudian perspective. A paradigm in social science: (a) guides the study of behavior by providing a way of viewing that behavior; and (b) is used to impute the paradigm to behavioral data or findings so we can judge how far the paradigm or theory explains the findings. Where mathematical or statistical models are inferred from a paradigm, they constitute scientific hypotheses. The mathematics helps bring out the implications of data and expose assumptions; it does not create knowledge out of nothing. Although we sometimes speak of a given study of consumer behavior as being method-driven in the sense that the appropriateness of the tools (usually a statistical package) at our disposal determines what is studied, it is still the researcher’s basic perspective that is in the driver’s seat, providing a framework for decision-making.

No social scientist comes to the study of human behavior with a completely open mind; each is guided by his or her perspective on what facts to collect, while perspectives color interpretations of the ‘facts’ and impact on decisions. In fact, even the interpretation of DNA evidence, at least in complex cases, is subject to bias in interpretation (The Economist, 21 January 2012: 90). Interpretations are tied to one’s perspective and – less clearly – to values, with Dworkin (2011) arguing in law that interpretations are value-laden ‘all the way down’. John Locke’s notion of a social contract constitutes the perspective that influenced the Founding Fathers of the United States (US), embodying the ideas of the people being sovereign; government originating from the consent of the governed; government legislating only for the common good; citizens having inalienable rights, and justifying resistance to tyranny. This constellation of ideas supplied the foundational perspective for the US Declaration of Independence and Constitution.

Consumers also have a point of view and it helps the marketer in persuading them if that point of view is reinforced or at least not challenged. Defining an issue, for example, in a certain way (‘putting a spin on it’) is often used in advertising to try to change current perspectives, just as Philip Morris tried to define cigarette advertising as defending the right to freedom of choice: a right that coheres with American values. Values reflect higher level concerns and the end-states in life that we support. What we are depends on what we are for, and our values reflect these adherences. This notion of values focuses on terminal concerns, rejecting the distinction between terminal and instrumental values, a view popularized by Rokeach (1973). To accept the notion of instrumental values is to contradict the very notion of values being superordinate – it is better to speak of ‘instrumental means’ rather than instrumental values. And there is something to be said about marketers considering instrumental means since this promotes laddering, whereby we start with products bought, used and consumed to trace the link to the likely values of the consumer. (Consumer values are distinguished from ‘value’ as used in economics which is defined as the sum of the net benefits occurring as the result of an exchange.)

Perspectives incorporate both values and beliefs. In politics it is often argued that it is more important that a politician claims to share a voter’s values or convictions than that he or she fully endorses the party’s expressed policies. But the feasibility of such sharing is not unproblematic because values are multiple and conflicting, for example between individual freedom and social responsibility. Consumers, like everyone else, are always involved in trade-offs – not just at the pedestrian level of trading off a lower price for lower quality but also at the highest level of human values like trading off more income for more equality in society. There is no single human value that tops all others, though some people talk as if ‘tolerance’ should be the absolute virtue and all other values, like integrity and honesty, should be subordinated to it. Honesty and integrity go together in that they presuppose truthfulness whereby people do not assert what they do not believe. We view a person of integrity as being trustworthy so perceptions of integrity enter into perceptions of credibility.

PERSPECTIVES, PARADIGMS, THEORIES AND MODELS

Science and the word ‘theory’ are closely associated because the word ‘theory’ is concerned with explicating explanatory frameworks: the ‘why’ of things, which is what science is about. Without theory, findings can amount to no more than interesting curiosities and there are lots of such interesting curiosities in the consumer behavior literature. Without ‘theory’ in social science you just have fashion, as is often the case in the literature on management. Even the findings from an experiment need to be interpreted in the light of background theory. However, the word ‘paradigm’ is coming to replace the word ‘theory’ in social science as ‘theory’ has come to have too diffuse a meaning. Thus Zaltman et al. (1982) in marketing define theory as ‘a system for ordering concepts in a way that produces understanding or insights’. This does not distinguish theory from model or indeed from the manufacture of any intelligible statement.

A social science paradigm is simply a scientific perspective. Models give structural form to aspects of theories or paradigms. If the structure of system X helps us in understanding the structure of system Y, then system X is a model of system Y. The social scientist constructs a model that, within a domain or range of phenomena, can be shown to agree more or less with observation of actual behavior.

It is not uncommon in a debate to move from using theory in the sense of an explanatory set of coherent and corroborated hypotheses to just meaning any speculative hypotheses (‘it is, after all, only a theory’). Whenever a word in common usage receives a technical (‘stipulated’) definition, there is always this danger of slipping from the technical definition to how the word is employed in common usage. This is something to guard against in reading the literature.

It was Thomas Kuhn (1962), in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, who used the term scientific paradigm in the sense in which we use it today. Since the notion of a scientific paradigm is now so much part of any reading on social science, it is part of any education in the social sciences to know what the term means. A scientific paradigm implicitly takes into account beliefs, values, concepts, theories, models and applications. Understanding a paradigm, argues Kuhn, does not come about from memorizing laws or theories or models but by mastering applications; being able to solve a certain class of problem and being able to recognize further applications in different situations. All this talk about understanding through doing resembles what Michael Polanyi (1958/1962) said about acquiring knowledge through working under a master, so in order to be trained as a medical diagnostician there is a need to undertake a long apprenticeship under the guidance of an expert. But surely students need to absorb the relevant theoretical concepts as well as undertaking the practice? Kuhn himself denied that Polanyi influenced him very much, although many disagree. Polanyi was a polymath, having a background as a medical doctor as well as being a top scientist in chemistry, a social scientist and a philosopher. The anti-rationalism in his philosophy of science was off-putting to philosophers who were more interested in justifying science than describing it, but the originality of his thinking is now being recognized (Nye 2011).

Kuhn’s initial (1962) definition of a paradigm was criticized for its vagueness and for having many variants of the concept. Kuhn (1974) later defined ‘paradigm’, as applied to the natural sciences, in two related senses:

First, as a disciplinary matrix: ‘disciplinary’ because the paradigm is the common possession of a scientific community and a ‘matrix’ because every paradigm embodies sets of orderly elements such as:

• Symbolic generalizations or expressions
• Beliefs and values sought, such as predictive accuracy, simplicity and consistency
• Models
• Exemplars: the shared set of crucial, striking, successful examples of problem solving applications.

Second, as a set of exemplars: while exemplars are part of the disciplinary matrix, they also characterize the field. Exemplars represent the paradigm-as-achievement and serve as models for future generations of scientists. They represent in the most fundamental sense the paradigm concept since they are the concrete successes attributable to the disciplinary matrix’s power. Their acceptance equates with the sharing of a common ideology, which makes for solidarity and mutual understanding.

Through his or her familiarity with the field’s exemplars, the scientist absorbs the rules to be followed for extending the application of the disciplinary matrix. Rules refer to types, not particulars. Working with the exemplars a scientist learns to interpret such and such as a ‘fact’ of a certain sort, while exemplars also provide implicit criteria as to what solutions are acceptable. The existence of a disciplinary matrix within a scientific community or specialist area of a science explains the ease of communication and wide agreement obtained.

The concept of a disciplinary matrix comes closer to defining the type of explanatory systems we have in social science than does the view of a science as being composed of theories along the lines traditionally proposed. On this basis, the various explanatory systems discussed in this book can be viewed as ‘paradigms’, although Kuhn would not agree since he seemed to believe that, in any discipline, one scientific paradigm should dominate. There is a lack of recognition here that different paradigms in social science address different questions or provide different windows into the same problem. In general when we move from one paradigm to another, for example from behaviorism to cognitive psychology, we are not progressing from error to truth but to an additional source of knowledge (defined as justified belief). Nonetheless, different paradigms may on occasion conflict or provide contradictory advice, just as a psychotherapist may insist it is necessary to know a patient’s early history, while the cognitive therapist may claim it is not necessary. On the other hand, recommendations stemming from various paradigms can be compatible or consistent in the sense that there is no contradiction among them. Although paradigms can be incommensurable, in that they cannot be ranked or ordered on a single measure or common scale, this does not mean they cannot be compared in that there are always bases for comparison even if simply on the basis of predicted effects.

There are different paradigms or perspectives in social science and it is easy to get locked into a perspective which becomes a mindset that rules out as heresy alternative viewpoints. A social science paradigm should not be an ideological credo but regarded as a conceptual lens through which to view human behavior. Because different paradigms may use different methods for tracking truth, perspectivism goes hand in hand with methodological pluralism, a doctrine which rejects any claim that there is just one set of methods that gives privileged access to understanding and explaining human behavior.

What perspectivism implies is that there is no absolute truth other than truth relative to one’s perspective, with the likelihood of each perspective having its own domain of suitability. Perspectives are not entirely substitutes for each other, with their suitability varying with purpose. But it is a compliment to business schools researching consumer behavior that they have not confined themselves to just one paradigm, in that we find most of the background paradigms being manifest in journal articles on consumer behavior. On the other hand, it is not true that academics in consumer behavior have invented new paradigms that lie beyond those discussed in this book. It is simply the field of application that is more or less new.

As we have said, social science models are imputed to data or findings to see if the data coheres with the paradigm. When they apply, they enrich understanding by providing a way to interpret behavior that may otherwise be puzzling and incoherent. They do not entirely displace commonsensical understanding. This is because, whichever social science models are imputed to data, there will always be gaps to be filled as there are no universal laws of a non-trivial nature that give a complete picture.

Many marketing academics view marketing as a technology rather than a science. Whereas the natural sciences seek explanations, technology is a rule-governed activity where the search is for rules that are neither true nor false but effective or ineffective in bringing about the result of interest. In economics, technology comes under technical rationality since it is geared to goal achievement. There is an attraction in viewing marketing as a technology, but understanding the consumer is related more to explanation. Those who advocate viewing marketing as a technology are often those who reject the notion of seeking ‘theory’ because there are no universal laws to be found. There is also the problem of external validity in the extent to which the findings of experiments can be generalized to other populations or to other contexts when what is significant about the experimental context is not necessarily known. Even an experiment cannot distinguish cause from a co-existing factor at work.

Many research findings on consumer behavior are like proverbs or principles of marketing in that they have objective relativism. The word principle is simply a more ‘upmarket’ term for the word ‘rule’, and suggests greater legitimacy. Proverbs and marketing principles are often ridiculed as there is usually an opposite contradictory proverb or marketing principle. Thus, the proverb ‘too many cooks spoil the broth’ can be contradicted by the principle ‘many hands make light work’. This simply demonstrates that proverbs are relative to the situatio...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• Preface
• 1. Introduction: Perspectivism and Other Basic Notions for Understanding the Nature of the Social Sciences
• 2. Ethnopsychology (Folk Psychology)
• 3. Ethnopsychology Continued: Application
• 4. Behaviorism
• 5. Psychoanalytic Psychology
• 6. Cognitive Psychology: The Basic Perspective
• 7. Cognitive Psychology Continued: Cognitive Psychology in Marketing
• 8. Cognitive Neuroscience (and a Comment on Evolutionary Psychology or Sociobiology)
• 9. Microeconomics (Rational Choice Theory)
• 10. Behavioral Economics
• 11. Social Psychology: Social Groups, Social Reference Groups and the Nature and Role of Emotion in Influencing Behavior
• 12. Social Psychology Continued: Lewin’s Attitude Change Model, Strategies for Overcoming Resistance to Change, Motivation and Reversal Theory
• 13. Sociology
• 14. Cultural Anthropology
• Postscript
• Appendix
• References
• Index