Who is Consumer Behavior Theory For?

2019/05/13

We enjoy shopping and gain new discoveries by using or consuming things. All of these are captured as consumer behavior, and it is clear that we lead richer lives through various experiences as consumers.

Consumer behavior theory is a subfield of marketing theory. Marketing refers to the mechanisms and strategies used to ensure that consumers continue to support products, services, and brands; however, to achieve this effectively and efficiently, it is necessary to understand consumer behavior. Therefore, as marketing gained importance in business practice in the United States, research into consumer behavior also attracted attention, becoming recognized as an academic field in the 1970s, and active research continues to this day.

Within this field, I conduct research focusing on the fact that consumers make sequential choices among multiple different products and services. For example, in situations such as shopping at a supermarket or ordering at a cafe, it is not uncommon to choose different items (e.g., cake and coffee) sequentially. In such cases, data shows that consumers tend to make subsequent choices while considering the results of their previous choices (e.g., choosing bitter coffee after choosing a sweet cake). This highlights the significance of analyzing choices by considering the influence between them, rather than treating each choice separately. If research findings on sequential choice become more generalized in the future, it will be possible to provide useful insights to retailers, for example, regarding layouts and promotions that take into account the interactions between different products.

As mentioned above, this type of research is based on the premise that an understanding of consumer behavior contributes to the realization of better marketing for companies. In this sense, it can be called consumer behavior theory "for companies (marketing)."

On the other hand, since we as consumers feel that our lives are enriched through consumer behavior, there is a need to actively engage in research aimed at providing insights directly to consumers—such as analyzing the mechanisms by which purchasing behavior enriches life—in other words, consumer behavior theory "for consumers."

In this way, consumer behavior theory has the potential to develop further as a jitsugaku (science), and I hope to contribute to that as a researcher myself.