Consumer Initiation and Imitation

In dealing with everyday consumer choice we have said little about what causes it to change, notably the introduction of new brands, new products, new practices. Why do established patterns of behavior exhibit dynamic breaks in continuity from time to time? Why do consumers stop buying within their current brand repertoire, if only temporarily, in order to try a new version of the same product? The topic is usually subsumed under the heading of consumer innovation or innovativeness in the marketing literature. But it is also relevant to the understandings of patterns of behavior and their interruption put forward by Rachlin and Ainslie. Crucially, however, it provides insight into the nature of the quest for evolutionary consistency in the ascription of intentional content on the basis of contingency-shaped molar behavior sequences. In this way, the analysis of consumers’ initiating and imitative behaviors becomes a vehicle for discussing the role of evolutionary logic within the framework of exposition for consumer theory worked out in the earlier chapters. The processes should be amenable to analysis in terms of an extensional behavioral science, intentional systems theory, intentional behaviorism and superpersonal cognitive psychology.