Consumer Behavior Analysis

Academic marketing takes much for granted, largely because it is not a discipline in its own right, but an application area that relies on the perspectives, theories, methodologies, and techniques provided by disciplines such as economics and psychology. At a theoretical level, it generally incorporates rather than creates. As a result, it frequently makes philosophical and methodological assumptions that stem directly from the deliberations of other scientists pursuing other ends. Whatever discipline forms the predominant underlying intellectual basis of marketing science at the moment – it was once economics, has been and continues to be economic psychology, but sociology and anthropology have had their days too – tends to provide a philosophical and theoretical foundation of a sort, ad hoc and temporary but sufficient unto the day. There may not be an easy alternative to this, given the nature of marketing inquiry, but it raises certain difficulties of explanation. For the methodological imperatives imported into marketing are, inevitably, not constructs that are in some way absolutely characteristic of the discipline involved but only those that are currently acceptable to the exponents of that discipline or a subdisciplinary section of it.