WEEK 5 - consumer psychology Flashcards
What is consumer psychology?
- Area of psychology focused on how consumers acquire,
consume, and dispose of goods, services (experiences, or
ideas). - Consumers can be individuals or groups including
businesses and families. - Consumers can act on behalf of/ be infl uenced by others
- Considers rational and irrational behaviours, and also the
influence of outside forces, trends, and advertising
Some areas of growth
- Online shopping
- App and gaming consumption
- The child’s infl uence on family consumption
- Minimalism and patterns of disposal
- Hording
- Health and food purchasing
- The COVID-19 Pandemic & behaviours
Cross over areas
social psychology
economics
marketing
individual factors
marketing
social psychology
health sychology
Micro consumer behaviour (individual focus)
Experimental psychology
Clinical psychology
Microeconomics
Social psychology
Sociology
Macroeconomics
Demography
History
Cultural anthropology
How is consumer psychology related to social psychology?
Consumer Psychology is an application of social
psychology intersecting with the knowledge &
methods of other disciplines. Much of what we will cover today looks at how to apply concepts already familiar to you.
Why should we care? Isn’t consumer psych just about making big business richer?
- Australians owe $130 for every $100 they earn
- The average Australian household wastes about $1300 a year
- Each Australian produces a ton of waste each year
- We are consuming and disposing well beyond our
limits
The consumer as an individual
Motivation
personality
attitudes and;
attitude change
What is motivation?
Biological, emotional, social, and cognitive forces that compels individuals to act.
* Urge to breech gap created through desire, drive, or need
What are needs?
- Needs or human requirements
- can be physiological (e.g. for food) or acquired/learned in
response to culture or environment (e.g., power or learning) - A need may not be strong enough to motivate an action
- People may be very conscious of a want without having
awareness of the need underlying it
Wants and Goal Objects
- Needs – requirements (physical, social, psychological)
- Food, water, shelter, security, education, recreation etc
- Wants (goals)– specifi c preferences for the sought after results of motivated behaviour
- It’s lunch time and you need food….in addition to this, you
want sushi - In marketing, goal will often be to tighten the consumer’s ‘want’ to a particular product.
Personality & consumer behaviour
- Situation specifi c traits are better predictors of consumer
preferences than general personality traits (eg brand
selection) - Consumers seek products/brands that are consistent with
their personality due to desire for congruence - Developing ‘brand personalities’ is one way marketers
seek to appeal to groups of consumers (Solomon et al
2013) - Archetypes have been developed – these are not
specifi cally linked to the dimensions of ‘personality’ that
we refer to as psychologists
What are the types of attitutdes
- Learned and have a motivational impact
- Transferrable - eg a conservative approach to dress may predictably transfer to other purchase
- Consistent – relatively consistent over time but not necessarily permanent
- Contextual– eg, while you might hold a generally unfavourable attitude to fast food, you may still purchase it
while on a road trip, or when coming home late and tired from a long work day
Theory of Planned Behaviour
The theory of planned behavior (TPB) is a cognitive theory by Azjen (1985) that proposes that an individual’s decision to engage in a specific behavior, such as gambling or stopping gambling, can be predicated by their intention to engage in that behavior
parts are:
personal attitudes
subjective norms
perceived behavioural control
The consumer in groups
Reference groups – family – culture - identity
Decision making literature
- Routine vs novel decisions
- The context and factors that infl uence our decisions as
consumers is complicated AND complex - Exploring decision making in full requires it’s own unit (or
degree) - The labour of love
- Money vs free, social and monetary contract
