What Is Consumer Psychology?
Consumer psychology studies the mind of the buyer. Here is what it covers, how it differs from consumer behaviour, where it came from and how researchers test it.
Answer to the question
What Is Consumer Psychology?
Consumer psychology is the study of the mental processes behind buying: perception, motivation, memory, emotion and judgement. It differs from consumer behaviour, which describes what buyers do, by explaining what happens inside the buyer. Researchers study it through experiments, field studies and surveys, each with strengths and limits.
Key takeaways
- Robert Zajonc argued in 1980 that affective judgements can occur before the perceptual and cognitive processes usually assumed to underlie them, so a liking may precede its reasons.
- In 1982 Morris Holbrook and Elizabeth Hirschman set the information processing view of the buyer beside an experiential view built on fantasies, feelings and fun.
- Sheena Iyengar and Mark Lepper found in 2000 that a display of 24 jams drew more stops (60 per cent of 242 passers-by) than one of 6 (40 per cent of 260), yet nearly 30 per cent of those who stopped at the smaller display bought, against 3 per cent at the larger.
- Richard Nisbett and Timothy Wilson reviewed evidence in 1977 that people may have little or no direct introspective access to higher-order mental processes, which is why surveys are checked against behaviour.
- Consumer behaviour describes what buyers do and what shapes it; consumer psychology explains the mental processes inside the buyer.
A purchase is the visible end of something that happened inside a head, and consumer psychology is the study of that hidden part. Five faculties do most of the work: perception decides what is noticed, motivation decides what is wanted, memory decides what is carried away, emotion colours the exchange and judgement settles on an option.
Pepe Martínez builds The Consumer Mind around mental functions of this kind, taking perception, attention, memory and emotion in turn and asking what each means for the way a brand is met.
What is consumer psychology as a field?
Each faculty has its own questions. Perception asks what a shopper registers of the shelf, the pack or the page, and what is filtered out. Motivation asks which needs and goals are active and how a want forms. Memory asks what is stored, what is recalled later and how an experience is summarised. Emotion asks how mood and feeling enter the choice. Judgement asks how options are compared and which shortcuts are used. The categories overlap in life, since a feeling can change what is noticed and a memory can change what is wanted, but separating them lets a study pose one question at a time.
The field takes the buyer's mind as its object and the marketplace as its setting. A researcher in consumer psychology asks how a person sees a shelf or a screen, what turns a vague need into a want, what is remembered afterwards, how feeling shapes the whole encounter and how a choice is finally made among options. The answers come from general psychology and are tested on shoppers, so the discipline sits between the two.
Emotion has a particular place in it, and the claim that it may come first dates to 1980, when Robert Zajonc argued that affective judgements can be largely independent of cognition and can occur before the perceptual and cognitive processes usually assumed to underlie them. In his account, emotional reactions are often a person's first responses and are often held with more confidence than cognitive judgements. For consumer psychology this changes the order of enquiry, because a liking may already be in place before the buyer has found a reason for it.
Practical work leans on all of this, and the Consumer Psychology Guide (Free PDF) pairs each area with one published finding.
How does it differ from consumer behaviour?
The two names overlap. A working split is by question. Consumer behaviour asks what people buy, when, where and how often, and which surroundings shape those patterns, including income, household, culture and shop design. Consumer psychology asks what goes on in the person while it happens. What Is Consumer Behavior covers the wider field and its stages; consumer psychology supplies the account of the mind inside them.
| Consumer psychology | Consumer behaviour | |
|---|---|---|
| Core question | How does the buyer see, want, remember and choose? | What do buyers do, and what shapes it? |
| Unit of study | The individual mind and its processes | Individuals, households and groups in context |
| Usual evidence | Experiments, interviews and carefully worded surveys | Purchase records, observation, surveys and the same experiments |
| Typical result | An account of a mechanism | A description of a pattern and its influences |
The table describes emphasis, not a wall. A study of a mental process often ends by describing a pattern, and a study of a pattern often needs a mental process to explain it.
Where did consumer psychology come from?
The history can be told in three turns. The first borrowed from behaviourism. Fifty years of work applying behaviourist ideas to consumer research and marketing, among them classical and operant conditioning and the matching and foraging theories, has been reviewed by Victoria Wells. The review notes that behaviourism has been less prominent in the field than other areas of psychology.
The second turn treated the buyer as an information processor, taking in facts about products, weighing them and deciding. By 1982 that model prevailed, which is the contrast drawn in a paper by Morris Holbrook and Elizabeth Hirschman. They set the information processing view beside an experiential one, in which consumption has a symbolic, hedonic and aesthetic side and is pursued for fantasies, feelings and fun. The paper gave pleasure, imagery and meaning a place among the discipline's subjects.
The third turn put feeling on equal terms with thought. Zajonc's 1980 paper, described above, belongs here, since it asked whether affect must wait for cognition at all. The discipline that results is a layered one, in which each turn kept the earlier accounts as tools instead of replacing them. Conditioning explains some repeated buying, information processing explains some comparison shopping and the experiential and affective accounts explain why so much shopping is enjoyed for itself.
How do researchers study the buyer's mind?
Experiments sit at the centre because they can separate cause from coincidence. The work of Sheena Iyengar and Mark Lepper in 2000 puts a field study and controlled studies in one paper.
In a supermarket tasting display run on two Saturdays, Iyengar and Lepper offered shoppers either 6 jams or 24. The larger display drew more stops, 60 per cent of 242 passers-by against 40 per cent of 260. Among those who stopped, though, nearly 30 per cent bought at the smaller display and 3 per cent at the larger. Two further studies, on essay topics and on chocolates, compared 6 options with 30 in controlled settings. The pairing shows the trade that researchers make: a field study gives real purchases in a real shop, and a controlled study gives command over what each participant sees. The fuller story is in Choice Overload After the Jam Study.
Surveys and interviews ask people directly, and their strength is reach. Their limit was set out by Richard Nisbett and Timothy Wilson in 1977. They reviewed evidence that people may have little or no direct introspective access to higher-order mental processes. When asked how a stimulus affected them, people tended to rely on plausible causal theories, though their reports could be accurate when the stimulus was salient and a common-sense cause of the response. Researchers therefore ask about what a person saw, did and recalls, and treat stated reasons as accounts to be checked against behaviour. You Do Not Know Why You Bought It follows this idea into everyday purchases.
A result is only as useful as its setting allows. The questions worth asking of any study are who took part, where it happened, what was measured and whether the measure was a choice, a rating or a statement. A rating of liking and a purchase with real money are different outcomes, so a claim should name which one it measured, and a field study and a controlled study may each be right about their own.
Most findings that travel well have passed through more than one of these methods. An effect seen in a controlled study, repeated in a shop and described by participants in their own words carries more weight than any one of the three alone. Repetition in a second sample or a second country adds further weight, since a result seen once may reflect the particular people or the particular day.
Common questions
What Is Consumer Psychology?
Consumer psychology is the study of the mental processes behind buying: perception, motivation, memory, emotion and judgement. It uses experiments, field studies and surveys to explain why people notice, want and choose what they do.
Is consumer psychology the same as consumer behaviour?
No. They overlap, but consumer behaviour describes what buyers do and what shapes it, while consumer psychology explains the mental processes at work inside the buyer.
How do researchers test consumer psychology?
They combine experiments, which isolate a cause, field studies in real shops, which add realism, and surveys, which add reach. Each has limits, so findings that appear in more than one method carry the most weight.
Sources
Martínez, P. The Consumer Mind. Seed book; vault hub Books/The Consumer Mind.
Holbrook, M. B., & Hirschman, E. C. (1982). “The experiential aspects of consumption: Consumer fantasies, feelings, and fun.” Journal of Consumer Research, 9(2). doi:10.1086/208906 https://doi.org/10.1086/208906
Wells, V. K. (2014). “Behavioural psychology, marketing and consumer behaviour: a literature review and future research agenda.” Journal of Marketing Management, 30(11-12). doi:10.1080/0267257X.2014.929161 https://doi.org/10.1080/0267257X.2014.929161
Zajonc, R. B. (1980). “Feeling and thinking: Preferences need no inferences.” American Psychologist, 35(2). doi:10.1037/0003-066X.35.2.151 https://doi.org/10.1037/0003-066X.35.2.151
Nisbett, R. E., & Wilson, T. D. (1977). “Telling more than we can know: Verbal reports on mental processes.” Psychological Review, 84(3). doi:10.1037/0033-295X.84.3.231 https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-295X.84.3.231
Iyengar, S. S., & Lepper, M. R. (2000). “When choice is demotivating: Can one desire too much of a good thing?” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 79(6). doi:10.1037/0022-3514.79.6.995 https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.79.6.995