The actual purchase is the culmination of these pre- vious phases, but it would appear that the process of purchase can also encapsulate more decision- making. New products that have not been found before, the impact of service personnel, alternatives which were not considered, pricing and payment circumstances, different channels to use in acquisi- tion, etc. The specialist consumer behaviour texts skim over purchase as something which everyone knows about and there is not much to say but increasingly, as services dominate the experiences associated with purchase become major consider- ations for marketers. This is especially true when we consider the emotional, cognitive and physical resources needed to consummate a purchase. We
will return to a consideration of the purchase envir- onment later in this chapter.
It should be evident that the decision process does not end once a purchase has been made since the consumer will continue to evaluate the product or service in use. This evaluation will feed into subsequent decisions. If the product is not satisfy- ing, then it will not be considered again or if the product becomes superseded, cannot be used due to the unavailability of peripherals or replenish- ment, its performance will be compromised. There are also some processes that the individual con- sumer uses to come to terms with their purchase. How many times have you checked the price of a product you have just purchased in different stores just to reassure yourself you got a good deal? How many product reviews have you read hoping that the product you purchased is highly rated? This is all part of the post-purchase evaluation. Clearly the outcome of this phase of our generalized deci- sion model will impact upon future purchases, loyalty and brand equity.
Depending upon how you break down the various stages in the decision model, you will have differing numbers of steps but the elements will be roughly the same. This consumer decision- making framework, which emerged from the early literature and the comprehensive models, was an important step forward. It not only focused upon the individual as the key to consumer behaviour, but it also served as an agenda for subsequent research. This was characterized with a focus upon the details of how consumers’ psychological process operated and it became known as the information processing approach which domin- ated consumer behaviour research through the 1970s (see Bettman, 1979).
The key assumptions of the information pro- cessing approach are that individual consumers engage in both active and conscious information processing when making choices. Second, that the rules (which dictate how the information is man- aged) can be modelled. Remember that we can not actually observe this phenomenon so the early modelling had to rely upon inference. In practice consumers were asked to talk through what they were thinking during a decision-making event. While these early studies proved instructive, it was the adoption of research from psychology that really started to put some weight behind an infor- mation processing view of the consumer. By understanding the ways in which information is stored, organized and retrieved, consumer behav- iour researchers could examine how decisions and
evaluations were conducted. Three cognitive oper- ations were critical. First, how consumers man- aged to associate new information with what they already held (specifically the role of rehearsal in strengthening new associations). Second, how information is encoded so that it is stored and retrieved. Third, how information is structured so that data could be retrieved together.
Information processing was important because it was predicted that the outcome of this information activity fed directly into individual consumer beliefs and attitudes about products. Beliefs are those things which consumers believe to be true or factually correct. For example, I might believe that Ariel is a well-known soap powder, or that Heinz products are available in every supermarket. By contrast, attitudes are evaluations of a product. For example, I think Ariel is too expensive, or I do not like the packaging of Heinz products. The importance from the information processing perspective is that our beliefs and atti- tudes combine together to form intentions which are then translated into purchases.
The elegance of the information processing approach is in the detailed modelling and exten- sive experimentation used to infer cognitive processes. But there were also two problems. The first was that while the processing models were ele- gant, they were all based upon individual experi- mentation. There were some significant problems caused by aggregation where it became evident that individual consumers were not very alike. The second and probably more significant problem was that attitudes, intentions and actual behaviour seemed to have very little correlation. In other words, when it got to observable behaviour, the theory did not stack up. A contribution by Fishbein and Ajzen (1975) went someway towards retriev- ing this desperate situation by focusing not on attitudes towards a particular product or object, but shifted the focus by measuring attitude towards a behaviour. In other words, rather than looking for attitudes towards an object (product) as a means to predict behaviour, measure attitude towards the behaviour in terms of the object (buy- ing it). In the past, researchers had asked people what they thought about a product and then used these evaluations to predict purchase. The Fishbein approach asked consumers about their attitude towards buying a particular product on their next shopping trip. A development of this research incorporated a subjective norm component with attitude to determine behavioural intentions. The resulting Theory of Reasoned Action (1975, 1980)
and the Theory of Planned Behaviour (1985) are still used as the basis for research today.
Before we leave the domain of the individual, we should also mention current consumer behav- iour research. A major thread is the increasing focus upon experiential consumption by individuals. This suggests that individual consumer behaviour is motivated not by rational decisions but by emotions and experiences. In the last two decades, marketing researchers have started to study the emotions prompted by products and brands (Holbrook and Hirschman, 1982). These studies have examined consumers’ emotional responses to advertising (e.g. Derbaix, 1995), and the role of emotions in customer satisfaction (e.g. Phillips and Baumgartner (2002), complaining (Stephens and Gwinner, 1998), service failures (Zeelenberg and Pieters, 1999) and attitudes (Dube et al., 2003). While the marketing literature is still developing, this thread of consumer research shows some promise in understanding the often volatile and unpredictable responses of consumers to market- ing efforts. In the next section we leave the domain of the individual operating in isolation and turn to the social context of consumer behaviour.