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Retail Business Environment

Notes 9.9 Support of Basic Disciplines

The current model developments in the consumer behaviour can also be seen through the
utilisation of the basic academic disciplines on which such models are mainly built. Economics,
which gave the earliest conceptualisation of consumer behaviour, assumed consumer to be a
rational economic entity. His choices were the focus of attention in’ economics at micro as well
as macro levels. The restrictive assumptions made in the discipline and the multitude of human
factors encountered in the practice of marketing reduces the utility of this discipline somewhat
in modelling consumer behaviour.

Psychology, with its focus on the why of human behaviour, has also contributed significantly to
the knowledge and modelling attempts of consumer behaviour. Almost every consumer
behaviour model uses; some psychological constructs. The understanding of these constructs
and their relationships with other constructs are often borrowed from the mother discipline of
psychology. The main problem with the psychological constructs had mainly been in the areas
of their operationalisability in the context of marketing, weaker relationships encountered and
exclusion of non-psychological variables. Sociology, similarly has also been used significantly
in understanding the group phenomena of consumers (such as market segmentation) and
different social processes among consumers (such as diffusion of innovations).

There are some disciplines whose roles are increasingly felt to be important by consumer
behaviour modelers. We are discussing the roles of some such disciplines next:
1. Decision Sciences: Consumer choice or decision is one- of the most important areas of
marketers interests. While economics and psychology (through cognitive psychology)
have developed in this area, the emerging discipline of Decision Sciences focuses upon it,
most directly. The advantages of this discipline in the area of consumer behaviour are
many. (i) This helps in tracking the flow of consumer decision making process; (ii) it helps
in sorting out the important attributes or features contributing to the decision; (iii) it helps
in understanding tradeoffs among these key attributes and their levels employed in the
minds of consumers. Another by product of utilising decision sciences paradigm in
consumer behaviour is the availability of decision sciences methodologies to consumer
behaviour.

2. Anthropology: The unique focus, which differentiates anthropology from rest of the
disciplines, is “man-to-physical-world-interaction”. Marketing, which is preoccupied with
consumer-product interfaces should be a natural strong borrower from this discipline.
Unfortunately, this has not happened, in the past. There are several reasons for this.
Anthropology itself had been preoccupied with, much broader issues like impact of wheel
on society or distribution of blood groups across population etc. For the reasons of making
its studies more scientific- and isolating the extraneous variables from the main variable
of interest, they had often set up their laboratories among the isolated tribals located in
remote areas. Such things gave to anthropology an esoteric aura. However, there is a
growing realisation, both among anthropologists and marketers, to cone closer and gain
from the mutual interactions. Anthropologists, on their part, have started studying the
phenomena which are commonplace in marketing and no longer overlook them as
mundane or difficult to scientifically capture through their established methodologies.
They are modifying their methodologies, searching for more managerially meaningful
contexts to- collect the data and-work with their disciplines. Systems Dynamics and
Simulation: System dynamics and simulation have been developed basically to model
complex situations. The tools of these techniques are specially honed to handle large
number of variable and their relationships. Consumer behaviour situations very closely

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