Consumer Behavior

Consumer behavior includes all of the activities of buyers, ex-buyers and potential buyers from prepurchase deliberation to postpurchase evaluation, and from continued consumption to discontinuance. It extends from the awareness of a want, through the search for and evaluation of possible means of satisfying it, and the act of purchase itself, to the evaluation of the purchased item in use, which directly impacts upon the probability of repurchase (Alba et al., 1991). The models of consumer behavior that emerged in the mid- to late-1960s on which the central theoretical perspective for academic consumer research has since relied almost exclusively, provided a distinctive meld of cognitive and social psychologies. Fundamental components of this paradigm include the goal-oriented reception, encoding, representation and processes of information; but equally determining was the way in which this cognitive procedure was linked to behavior in the sequence of belief-, attitude-, and intention—formation. The initial emphasis was upon high involvement processing but, by successive elaborations, several of the models have gradually acceded to and accommodated low involvement processing (Engel et al., 1995; Howard, 1989) which may influence capacity for recall without requiring prior evaluation (Hawkins & Hoch, 1992).