Consumer Behavior
The field that studies how people and households recognise a need, search for ways to meet it, choose, buy, use what they bought and finally dispose of it, together with the influences on each step.
What it is
Cathy Neal, Pascale Quester and Del Hawkins organise their textbook Consumer Behaviour around this arc, with influences from outside and inside the buyer feeding a staged decision process that continues after the purchase. The field draws on psychology, sociology, economics, anthropology and marketing. On this site it is read alongside Consumer Decision Process, Consumer Psychology and Word of Mouth.
In effect
A first car may pass through every stage over weeks, while a familiar loaf of bread is bought by habit with almost no search. The research question is which stages a given purchase actually uses.
What it does not say
It is not the same thing as Consumer Decision Process, which sits close to it on this site but describes a different part of how people decide. It also does not say that the finding reaches every product, buyer or setting; where this page goes beyond the cited research, the step is an inference and is labelled as one.
Sources
- See the article listed above for the work this page draws on.