Customer Behaviour
The study of consumer behaviour is mainly concerned with understanding how individuals or groups
acquire, use and dispose of products, services, ideas or experiences
The increase in the range of products available for consumption is due to:
Industrial innovations
Consumption offering social recognition
Inventions that simplified people’s lives
Conspicuous consumption = the purchasing of luxury items to publicly display wealth to enhance
identity and/of prestige / the use of goods to gain social recognition
Consumers in developing countries consume prestigious western products, because they believe that
prestigious western brands offer more status than local brands
Self-service supermarkets encourage impulse buying
Pop-up shops offer consumers surprise and novelty
Sustainable Development Goals are 17 goals which consider the needs of people as well as limits of
our planetary resources
Consumer activists campaign to ensure that producers and retailers recognise their responsibility to
the consumer in producing goods that are safe, fair and of the value promised
Excessive consumption results in long-lasting negative consequences for our planet
The internet:
Allows consumers to encourage/pressure companies to behave more ethically
Can be used to help people consume more ethically
Helps consumers find out about companies ethical practices
Exchange value can be said to represent what the value of a good is to the consumer and therefore
what it could be exchanged for, usually its price
Use value is the value of a good to the consumer in terms of the usefulness it provides
Symbolic value is the symbolic meaning consumers attach to goods to construct and participate in
the social world
According to postmodernist theory consumers explore different and separate identities to match the
fragmenting markets and the proliferation of products available to them
The post-modernist consumer is an empowered consumer
Co-creation refers to:
- Consumers taking an active role in the production of a firm’s products
- Consumers investing in their own business
Experiential consumption helps us to understand the sensory and hedonic aspects of consumption
The idea of experiential marketing shifts emphasis from the consumer as a rational decision-maker
to a model where the consumer is viewed as an experience-seeker
Contexts of decisions placing emphasis on the environment within which consumption choices take
place
, In the automatic mode, you are operating routinely with little effort and no feeling of voluntarily
being in control
In the reflective mode, you give effortful attention to a mental activity, and this is often associated
with considered choice and concentration
Controlled, effortful, slow, conscious, deductive
Choice architecture describes how the way a choice is presented influences the choice made
Mental accounting is when individuals allocate assets into separate, non-transferable groupings to
which they may assign different levels of utility
- Can lead to irrational decision making
- Are sometimes used as a self-control strategy
- Can allow companies to predict consumer spending patterns
Loss aversion is how we generally dislike losses more than we like gains of an equivalent amount
Norms can be defined as informal rules that govern behaviour (cultural and social)
Net zero is defined as attaining a balance between all the carbon emission produced by a company
and the carbon removed from the air
Carbon neutral is when an activity might generate greenhouse gases but it will not add to global
warming because any greenhouse gas produced is immediately captured before it can be released
into the atmosphere
Sustainable marketing is marketing that enables sustainable development, integrating
environmental and ethical concerns within marketing thinking and practice to achieve long-term,
sustainability-orientated goals for the firm, consumers, and wider stakeholder groups
The triple bottom line is about considering not only the financial bottom line but also the social and
environmental performance of a company
Corporate social responsibility (CSR) to include issues wider than the social, encompasses to
economic, legal, ethical, philanthropic, social, environmental, and accountability expectations that
society has of firms
Green washing is when companies engage in CSR practices and use marketing communications to
convey an image of social and/or environmental responsibility among consumers, when in fact they
are engaging in irresponsible, unsustainable, and/or unethical actions in the marketplace
Woke washing is defined as a company’s actions and communications that convey support for
marginalized causes and/or groups while the company continues to practice business activities that
harm such causes and/or groups
Sustainable products are marked by credence attributes, which are attributes that consumers cannot
evaluate easily due to either a lack of expertise or the costs involved in searching for reliable
information
The study of consumer behaviour is mainly concerned with understanding how individuals or groups
acquire, use and dispose of products, services, ideas or experiences
The increase in the range of products available for consumption is due to:
Industrial innovations
Consumption offering social recognition
Inventions that simplified people’s lives
Conspicuous consumption = the purchasing of luxury items to publicly display wealth to enhance
identity and/of prestige / the use of goods to gain social recognition
Consumers in developing countries consume prestigious western products, because they believe that
prestigious western brands offer more status than local brands
Self-service supermarkets encourage impulse buying
Pop-up shops offer consumers surprise and novelty
Sustainable Development Goals are 17 goals which consider the needs of people as well as limits of
our planetary resources
Consumer activists campaign to ensure that producers and retailers recognise their responsibility to
the consumer in producing goods that are safe, fair and of the value promised
Excessive consumption results in long-lasting negative consequences for our planet
The internet:
Allows consumers to encourage/pressure companies to behave more ethically
Can be used to help people consume more ethically
Helps consumers find out about companies ethical practices
Exchange value can be said to represent what the value of a good is to the consumer and therefore
what it could be exchanged for, usually its price
Use value is the value of a good to the consumer in terms of the usefulness it provides
Symbolic value is the symbolic meaning consumers attach to goods to construct and participate in
the social world
According to postmodernist theory consumers explore different and separate identities to match the
fragmenting markets and the proliferation of products available to them
The post-modernist consumer is an empowered consumer
Co-creation refers to:
- Consumers taking an active role in the production of a firm’s products
- Consumers investing in their own business
Experiential consumption helps us to understand the sensory and hedonic aspects of consumption
The idea of experiential marketing shifts emphasis from the consumer as a rational decision-maker
to a model where the consumer is viewed as an experience-seeker
Contexts of decisions placing emphasis on the environment within which consumption choices take
place
, In the automatic mode, you are operating routinely with little effort and no feeling of voluntarily
being in control
In the reflective mode, you give effortful attention to a mental activity, and this is often associated
with considered choice and concentration
Controlled, effortful, slow, conscious, deductive
Choice architecture describes how the way a choice is presented influences the choice made
Mental accounting is when individuals allocate assets into separate, non-transferable groupings to
which they may assign different levels of utility
- Can lead to irrational decision making
- Are sometimes used as a self-control strategy
- Can allow companies to predict consumer spending patterns
Loss aversion is how we generally dislike losses more than we like gains of an equivalent amount
Norms can be defined as informal rules that govern behaviour (cultural and social)
Net zero is defined as attaining a balance between all the carbon emission produced by a company
and the carbon removed from the air
Carbon neutral is when an activity might generate greenhouse gases but it will not add to global
warming because any greenhouse gas produced is immediately captured before it can be released
into the atmosphere
Sustainable marketing is marketing that enables sustainable development, integrating
environmental and ethical concerns within marketing thinking and practice to achieve long-term,
sustainability-orientated goals for the firm, consumers, and wider stakeholder groups
The triple bottom line is about considering not only the financial bottom line but also the social and
environmental performance of a company
Corporate social responsibility (CSR) to include issues wider than the social, encompasses to
economic, legal, ethical, philanthropic, social, environmental, and accountability expectations that
society has of firms
Green washing is when companies engage in CSR practices and use marketing communications to
convey an image of social and/or environmental responsibility among consumers, when in fact they
are engaging in irresponsible, unsustainable, and/or unethical actions in the marketplace
Woke washing is defined as a company’s actions and communications that convey support for
marginalized causes and/or groups while the company continues to practice business activities that
harm such causes and/or groups
Sustainable products are marked by credence attributes, which are attributes that consumers cannot
evaluate easily due to either a lack of expertise or the costs involved in searching for reliable
information
