Introduction to Consumer Behaviour

MN3055
Dr. Benedetta Cappellini
Your tutors
• Dr. Benedetta Cappellini
Office hours: Friday 11-13 (FE109)
benedetta.cappellini@rhul.ac.uk

• Prof. Alan Bradshaw

Office hours: Wednesday 4-5 (when teaching)
alan.bradshaw@rhul.ac.uk
Aims of the course
• Understanding consumers and consumption. What is the difference?

• Developing critical understandings of consumer behaviour that will

hold relevance both inside and outside the domain of marketing
practice. Why?

• Understanding the nature of contemporary consumption, markets

and culture. Why?
Assessments
1. Coursework. Essay: 2000 word (40%)

You are what you eat. Discuss this statement using theories on social class
illustrated in the lectures.

Select a film of your choice and analyse the role of consumption in the narrative. In
building your argument, use theories and examples illustrated in class.

Deadline: 20/3/19

2. Exam (2 out of 5 open questions) (60%)

Assessment criteria (for coursework and
exam) 1
Overall: Answering the question(s); knowledge and understanding of
theory and literature; knowledge and reference to appropriate cases
and evidence; and analysis and structure.

Data: Draw upon the suggested readings indicated for each lecture
and workshop, as well as seeking out and using additional apposite
material including case study examples.
Assessment criteria (for coursework and
exam) 2
Logic and coherence: Introduce the topic, e.g. presenting an overview and
indicating the key theoretical and empirical points that will cover the topic or
validate your argument.
The core of the assignment or exam question answering should then
investigate each of these key issues in turn. You should bear in mind the links
between each key issue and your main argument and the links between the
key issues.
The conclusion should summarise and re-emphasise the main argument and
key points.

References: Full regulations on essay writing including referencing system

are given in the School of Management Student Handbook.
Consumer Behaviour Defined:
The study of the processes involved when
individuals or groups select, purchase, use or
dispose of products, services, ideas or experiences
to satisfy needs and desires.
 Importance of consumption
Consumption plays an important role in our social,
Consumption plays an
psychological, economical, political, and cultural lives.
important role in our social,
psychological, economical,
political, and cultural lives.
 Consumption – an ongoing process
An exchange in which two or more organisations or
people give and receive something of value.

Pre-purchase

Purchase

Post-purchase
 Actors in the consumption play

• Purchaser.

• User.

• Influencer.

• Organisations

• (different company agents, & the family)

 Role theory and consumer behaviour

Consumer behaviour resembles actions/roles in plays.

• Choosers – choosing between different alternatives.
• Communicators – selecting goods that display our roles and
statuses.
• Identity seekers – showing our “real” selves.
• Pleasure seekers – in search of a real kick of pleasure.
• Victims – of fraudulent or harmful offerings.
• Rebels – reacting against authority turning something into
something else.
• Activists – boycotting products that do not meet ethical
standards.
 Consumers’ relationships with products
• Self concept
attachment – the
product helps to
establish the
user’s identity.

• Nostalgic
attachment – the
product serves as a
link with a past self.
 Consumers’ relationships with
products
• Interdependence – the
product is a part of the
user’s daily routine.

• Love – the product elicits

bonds of warmth,
passion, or other strong
emotion.
 Consumption activities

• An experience – when consumption is a

personal, emotional, or aesthetic goal in itself.
• As integration – using and manipulating
consumption objects to express aspects of
oneself.
• As classification – to communicate association
with objects, both to self and others.
• As play – to participate in a mutual experience
and merge identities with that of a group.

Douglas Holt – How Consumers Consume, JCR.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jfyL8qAxvPU
Identity and materiality
• Mary Douglas ‘goods are needed for “making visible and stable the
categories of culture”

• Daniel Miller: object and subject are in a dialectical relationship

• Alan Warde: consumption is a ‘moment’ in every practice

 A theory of shopping (Miller)
• Shopping as sacrifice
• The role of the ‘treat’
• The construction of a deserving subject
 Who is Interested in Consumers?

• Business
• Makes good business sense if companies want to understand
their customers’ needs.

• As an input into the marketing strategy – consumer response

may often be the ultimate test of whether or not a marketing
strategy will succeed.

• Consumers often behave in unpredictable ways

• BUT: other constituents apart from business:
• Societal issues
• Consumers themselves/human welfare
 The Need to Question!

• No natural condition of being a consumer. Rather there is a

history through which people come to be regarded and treated as
consumers.
• Label of consumer is controversial; e.g., are people who study in
universities students of the university or consumers of the
university?
• Are there times when we would not want to be labelled as
consumers?
• Does being a consumer empower us to have better choice?
How?
The pyramid of consumer behaviour
Study consumption: from the individual to
the collective (and the macro)
 Positivism and interpretivism

Positivism emphasises the objectivity of

science and the consumer as a rational
decision maker.

Interpretivism stresses the subjective

meaning of the consumer’s individual
experience and the idea that any
behaviour is subject to multiple
interpretations rather than one single
explanation.
 Positivist versus interpretivist
approaches to consumer behaviour

Table 1.4
Source: Adapted from Laurel A. Hudson and Julie L. Ozanne, ‘Alternative Ways of Seeking Knowledge in Consumer
Research’, Journal of Consumer Research 14 (March 1988): 508–21. Reprinted with the permission of The University of
Chicago Press.
The myth of objectivity

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z_dlK
x3peJk
How do we study consumption?
• Focus on the practice rather than the consumer
- De-centralising the role of consumer
- Importance of materiality
- Micro and macro aspects of consumption (consumption is an aspect in
every practice)

Practices as open and spatially, temporally dispersed sets of doings and

sayings organised by common understandings, teleology (ends and tasks)
and rules.
Practices are inevitably entangled with the material arrangements that they
contribute to create, in which they are carried out and through which they
transpire.
Politics of consumption

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zA9D1W1q-5I

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kehu8QBHCCk
Politics of consumption

Ambrogio Lorenzetti, Siena, Italy, 1342

Dupe or hero?
Consumers versus producers
• A new class system or a categorical misnomer?

• ‘Consumers are the agents that actively exploit and dominate third
world labourers’. Discuss

• Is consumption a symptom or a cause of inequalities?

The commodity trail
• De-fetishizing commodities

• Following the thing (Appadurai 1988)

•
• Recognising the conditions of labour
and production

• Is Fairtrade a solution? For whom?