It is a discipline that allows marketing to understand the behavior of people when thinking or making a purchase. It is analyzed from an individual perspective and from the social sphere.
Knowing what motivates people to, consciously or unconsciously, buy a product or acquire a service has always been crucial for marketing to establish specific guidelines and carry out an effective marketing process. In this sense, it is necessary to know how psychology helps to understand and analyze consumer behavior.
Consumer psychology
Psychologists Ismael Quintanilla and Tomás Bonavía explain in their book Psychology and Economics (2005) that consumer psychology “studies consumer behavior and the psychological processes that determine it, as well as other aspects of marketing that can be treated and analyzed, such as sales techniques, the selection and training of salespeople, the advertising communication process, and market research.” The authors include the negative effects of consumption and consumer protection.
In their book Consumer Behavior: Strategies and Policies Applied to Marketing (2013), business experts Rolando Arellano Cueva and Jaime Rivera define consumer behavior as “the decision-making process and physical activity that individuals perform when they search for, evaluate, acquire, and consume goods, services, or ideas to satisfy their needs.” This concept considers how people influence within a group or vice versa, impacting decisions.
In this way, consumer psychology seeks to understand the reasons that cpa email addresses motivate people to satisfy their desires and needs through consumption . To do so, it relies on various information, communication and social influence strategies, with which it can explain and predict behavior , both individually and as a group.
Today, this application of psychology is oriented towards a global and integrative perspective. This means that it seeks the development of organizations that are more concerned with establishing a true and lasting social exchange. As a result, the field of action has been considerably expanded.
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How does psychology influence consumer behavior?
In the mid-1960s, consumer behavior was a relatively new field of study. Over the years, marketing has borrowed some concepts developed by certain disciplines, such as psychology. In this case, it was interested in the study of a person and the ways in which he or she interacts with others. This has allowed it to establish better strategies, giving way to market segmentation as an essential aspect.
Rolando Arellano Cueva and Jaime Rivera Camino also state that “the study of consumer behavior provides an instrument that allows us to predict how consumers would react to promotional messages and to understand the reasons why purchasing decisions are made.” As a final result, this process allows us to develop commercial strategies to influence consumer behavior.
This is how psychology studies motivation, attitudes, perception, learning patterns and the personality of individuals, which is essential to understanding their behavior. It helps determine people's consumption needs and the reactions they have to products and messages. This allows us to understand how previous experiences affect the purchasing process and the choice of products.
What psychological phenomena does consumer psychology study?
In order to thoroughly study consumer behavior, the intervention of social psychology is necessary , since people's behavior depends, to a large extent, on the influence of their family, friends or any person in authority. In this way, it is possible to analyze the extent to which purchasing behavior is affected by those around the subject.
To carry out this study, the decision-making process is analyzed, considering the type of product, the experience and the information available. To make decisions when purchasing a product or service, the following steps must be completed: