Segmentation is a fundamental topic in marketing strategy. Appreciation of its importance has continuously grown since the 1950s. Segmentation is crucial to targeting messages, fitting preferences of different consumer groups, or creating other types of differentiated programmes. In consumer marketing, segmentation may be based on demographics, perceptions and attitudes (mental constructs more generally), and behavioural… Read More
Getting Closer to Consumers Through Ethnography
Marketing and consumer researchers need to employ a dose of curiosity for understanding, more closely and deeply, groups or communities of consumers that are less familiar and more different from them. It can be sought by observation of individuals from the group of interest, listening to and talking with them, and possibly interacting with them… Read More
The Issues Troubling Consumers, and Their Search for Answers
For a fifth year in a row, consumers worldwide are living in an era that can be closely described as very busy, oftentimes turbulent, and full of challenges. It is an unstable era. The events or developments of this era, explicitly or through their consequences, touch on multiple areas: health-oriented, economic, political, socio-cultural, and technological.… Read More
Directions for the Future of Research on Consumer Behaviour
There are so many changes and developments that have taken place since the start of the 21st century to talk about — social, technological, and environmental; the social dimension includes both socio-economic and socio-political changes. Consumers are affected by the shifts that surround them, modifying and adapting their behaviours of shopping, purchase and consumption. In… Read More
A Spotlight on the Gap Between Purchase Intention and Actual Behaviour
Rick, who is unhappy with the increased frequency of repairs that his current car requires, intends to buy a new car to replace it within the next six months. Sandy, on the other hand, has her mind set on buying a bicycle in the coming month to help her move around more freely within the… Read More
From Research Findings to Business Decisions: Reporting or Telling a Story?
It is a challenge that follows marketing and consumer research for many years: How to get not only the interest of business decision-makers in the findings from research but also their readiness to implement their lessons from the research? More than being intrigued and interested in the details of analytic findings, business decision-makers (e.g., owners,… Read More
Conjoint and MaxDiff: Choice-Based Methods for Measuring Consumer Preferences
Choice-Based Conjoint and MaxDiff (i.e., Maximum Difference, also known as Best-Worst scaling) are advanced methods for measuring and estimating consumer preferences by means of choice experiments and discrete choice models. Conjoint Analysis is a veteran methodology, initiated in the early 1970s, for measuring multi-attribute consumer preferences, based on ranking order or rating evaluations of product… Read More
Marketing-Driven Financial Valuation of Brands
Assessments of the monetary value of brands has long interested and motivated the management of firms, and their investors. From a business perspective, the financial value is a preferred measure of brand equity or return-on-investment in brands. But a brand is a marketing-driven and consumer-based entity, and hence one cannot detach the financial value of… Read More
Consumer / Shopper / Customer Behaviour 