What Is Consumer Behavior?
The field follows a purchase from the first sense of a need to the day the product leaves the house, and the people and places around it. Here is the cycle, how it differs from consumer psychology, and five findings a business can use.
Answer to the question
What Is Consumer Behavior?
Consumer behavior is the study of how people recognise a need, search for options, choose, buy, use and finally dispose of products, together with the family, friends, culture and settings that shape each step. It is wider than consumer psychology, which looks at the mental processes behind a choice.
Key takeaways
- Cathy Neal, Pascale Quester and Del Hawkins organise consumer behavior as a staged process that runs from need recognition to what happens after the purchase, fed by influences from outside and inside the buyer.
- Sharon Beatty and Scott Smith (1987) found that purchase involvement, attitudes toward shopping, time available and product knowledge each related to how much people searched across five electronics products.
- Johan Arndt (1967) found that people who heard favourable comments about a new product were more likely to accept it, and those who heard unfavourable comments less likely.
- Richard Oliver (1980) proposed that satisfaction depends on the gap between expectation and outcome and shapes the intention to buy again, while Wendy Wood and David Neal (2009) described consumer habits as responses cued by familiar contexts.
A purchase takes seconds at a till, while the behaviour around it, across seven stages, can run for years.
It begins with noticing a need and ends, often much later, with getting rid of the thing bought. What is consumer behavior as a field? It covers that whole run and the people and places around it, because family, friends, shops and habits all shape what happens at each step.
What is consumer behavior, exactly?
In textbook terms, the field studies how people and households recognise a need, look for ways to meet it, choose among options, buy, use what they bought and finally get rid of it, together with the influences that act on each step. Cathy Neal, Pascale Quester and Del Hawkins build their textbook Consumer Behaviour around this arc. In their model, influences from outside the buyer, such as culture, family and reference groups, and influences from inside, such as perception, learning, motives and attitudes, feed a staged decision process that continues after the purchase rather than ending at it.
The authors are careful to present the model as a way of organising events, not as a forecast of any single choice. Many purchases skip stages. A familiar loaf of bread is picked up out of habit with no search to speak of, while a first car or a wedding venue may take weeks of comparison. The stages work as a map of places where behaviour can happen, and the research question is always which of them a given purchase actually passes through.
Consumer behavior is usually split into seven stages, each with something a business can learn.
| Stage | What the buyer does | What a business can study |
|---|---|---|
| Need recognition | Notices a gap between how things are and how they would like them to be | What opens the gap: running out, a life change, an advert, a friend |
| Information search | Recalls what they know and looks outward to shops, media and other people | Which sources are consulted and how much effort goes in |
| Evaluation and choice | Compares options on the attributes that matter to them | Which attributes decide, and which options are never considered |
| Purchase | Picks a channel, a shop and a moment to buy | Where and when the decision is finally made |
| Use | Fits the product into daily life, often by routine | How use settles into habit and what cues it |
| Post-purchase evaluation | Judges the result against what they expected | Satisfaction, complaints, repeat buying and word of mouth |
| Disposal | Keeps, stores, passes on, sells or throws away | What happens to the product and how that leads to the next purchase |
Where does consumer psychology fit in?
Consumer psychology and consumer behavior overlap heavily, and the two terms are often used as if they were one. The cleanest way to tell consumer behavior from consumer psychology is scope. Consumer psychology asks what goes on in the mind of a buyer: attention, memory, emotion, judgement and the shortcuts people use when they choose. Consumer behavior draws on that psychology and adds sociology, economics, anthropology and marketing, and it follows the whole sequence, including what households decide together, what a culture treats as normal and what happens to products long after the buyer has stopped thinking about them.
A psychologist might study why a scarce item feels more desirable. A consumer behavior researcher might also ask who in the household proposed the purchase, where it was bought, how often it was used and what became of it two years later.
The practical consequence for a business is that asking what is consumer behavior leads to a broader question than persuasion. It asks where in the sequence customers are being lost, and it treats the people around the buyer and the settings they buy in as part of the answer.
Who shapes the search for options?
Take the search stage of what is consumer behavior: how much looking people do before they buy varies a great deal, and much of the variation lies in the buyer rather than the product. A 1987 study by Sharon Beatty and Scott Smith examined external search effort across five consumer electronics products. Purchase involvement, attitudes toward shopping, time available and knowledge of the product class each related to how much searching people did, while ego involvement with the product showed no significant link. The same factors also affected the separate kinds of source people turned to, namely shops, media, other people and neutral sources.
For a business, that moves attention from the product to the buyer's situation. Two people buying the same television may search very differently because one enjoys shopping and has a free weekend while the other knows the category well and is short of time. A shop that wants to serve both needs a quick route to a decision as well as a thorough one.
Other people enter the sequence early and stay in it. A 1967 experiment tested how conversations about a new product affected its short-term uptake. People who heard favourable comments were more likely to accept the product, and people who heard unfavourable comments were less likely to. The study helped establish word of mouth as part of buying itself rather than as background noise around it, and it is one reason the field treats households, friends and reference groups as active participants. A purchase may be suggested by a child, researched by a parent and paid for by a grandparent, and each conversation along the way can move the outcome.
What happens after the sale?
The stages after purchase carry much of the commercial weight. Satisfaction, Richard Oliver proposed in 1980, depends on what a buyer expected and on the gap between that expectation and what actually happened, and in turn shapes later attitudes and the intention to buy again. A two-stage field study supported the scheme. For a seller, the model has a plain implication: a promise sets the bar that the product then has to clear, so overselling can cost the repeat sale it was meant to secure.
Use is often run by habit rather than fresh decisions. Habits, in the 2009 account by Wendy Wood and David Neal, are responses cued by contexts that have accompanied past behaviour, quick to start and slow to change, and people lean on them more under time pressure, distraction and depleted self-control. Much repeat buying runs on such cues, from the same shop on the same route to the same brand on the same shelf. When the setting changes, the routine loses some of its triggers, which makes a house move or a new job a moment worth understanding.
Disposal is the stage businesses tend to study least. A 1977 paper by Jacob Jacoby, Carol Berning and Thomas Dietvorst raised it directly and asked what consumers do with products once they have outlived their usefulness and how that relates to buying a replacement. The textbook lists the options that follow: keep the product, store it, pass it on, sell it or throw it away. Each says something about the next purchase. A product left in a cupboard may delay a replacement, and one sold on may help pay for it.
Inside a business, what is consumer behavior becomes a practical question of which team owns which stage. Marketing tends to hold need recognition and search, sales holds the purchase and service holds use and complaints. Disposal often belongs to no one, even though the moment an old item leaves a home is often the moment its owner starts looking for whatever will replace it.
A business that asks what is consumer behavior at that moment of replacement, and asks where the old item went, who in the household decided to let it go and what was bought in its place, learns a good deal about where the next sale is likely to go and which maker is best placed to win it when that time comes round.
Common questions
What Is Consumer Behavior?
Consumer behavior is the study of how people decide what to buy, how they use it and what they do with it afterwards, along with the people and settings that influence each step.
What is consumer behavior research used for?
Asked what is consumer behavior for, a business can point to four uses: finding where customers drop out of the sequence, learning which sources buyers trust when they search, understanding what drives satisfaction and repeat buying, and seeing how products leave the household.
Is consumer behavior the same as consumer psychology?
No. Consumer psychology focuses on the mental processes behind choices, such as attention, memory and judgement. Consumer behavior is wider: it uses psychology alongside sociology, economics and marketing, and it follows the whole cycle from need to disposal, including the people around the buyer.
Sources
Neal, C. M., Quester, P. G., & Hawkins, D. I. Consumer Behaviour. Seed book; vault hub Books/Consumer Behaviour.
Beatty, S. E., & Smith, S. M. (1987). External search effort: An investigation across several product categories. Journal of Consumer Research, 14(1). doi:10.1086/209095 https://doi.org/10.1086/209095
Arndt, J. (1967). Role of product-related conversations in the diffusion of a new product. Journal of Marketing Research, 4(3). doi:10.1177/002224376700400308 https://doi.org/10.1177/002224376700400308
Oliver, R. L. (1980). A cognitive model of the antecedents and consequences of satisfaction decisions. Journal of Marketing Research, 17(4). doi:10.1177/002224378001700405 https://doi.org/10.1177/002224378001700405
Wood, W., & Neal, D. T. (2009). The habitual consumer. Journal of Consumer Psychology, 19(4). doi:10.1016/j.jcps.2009.08.003 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jcps.2009.08.003
Jacoby, J., Berning, C. K., & Dietvorst, T. F. (1977). What about disposition? Journal of Marketing, 41(2). doi:10.1177/002224297704100212 https://doi.org/10.1177/002224297704100212