How to study consumer behavior: the decision process, the factors and the cases

If you're wondering how to study consumer behavior, here's the short answer: use the consumer decision process as the skeleton of the whole course, place every new concept in one of its stages, sort the factors that shape a purchase into a table, and practice by explaining real purchases with those concepts. You don't pass this course by knowing definitions. You pass it when you can look at any purchase and say what happened, at which stage, and why.

It's a core course in marketing, sales and advertising programs, and it often shows up in business degrees too. What makes it hard is twofold. First, it borrows concepts from psychology, sociology and economics (motivation, perception, attitudes, reference groups, social class), and on the lecture slides they all look alike: attitude and belief blur together, and so do motivation and need. Second, everyone is a consumer, and that's a trap. The course feels easy because every example is something you do every day, and then the midterm asks for the exact name of a concept and how it differs from the one next to it.

It's not my major: I study computer engineering. What follows comes from looking closely at how this course is studied and graded, and from what we know about how people learn. For the degree as a whole I already wrote how to study marketing; here I'm sticking to what's specific to consumer behavior.

The decision process is the skeleton

Almost every textbook builds the course around the same model: five stages, from recognizing a need to what happens after you buy. Learn it before anything else, because everything else hangs off it:

1. Need recognition. There's a gap between where you are and where you'd like to be. It can come from inside (you're hungry) or outside (you walk past a bakery).
2. Information search. What you already know, what friends tell you, reviews, ads, what you see in the store.
3. Evaluation of alternatives. You compare options on the attributes you care about.
4. Purchase decision. You pick what, where and when. Something can still change your mind here.
5. Post-purchase behavior. You're satisfied or you're not, and that decides whether you buy again and what you tell other people.

Every new concept in the course lives in some stage. Cognitive dissonance, that nagging "did I choose right?", belongs to stage five. The set of brands you consider belongs to stage three. The stimuli that trigger a need belong to stage one. Whenever a lecture introduces a topic, ask which stage it happens in and write it down that way in your notes. By finals week you'll have the model filled in, instead of fifty loose concepts.

One distinction that's usually on the slides and worth keeping in mind: not every purchase goes through all five stages at the same pace. A high-involvement purchase (a laptop, a college) walks through all of them, slowly; a low-involvement one (a soda) jumps almost straight from need to decision. Telling them apart is a classic exam question.

The factors, in a table

The other half of the syllabus answers why different people decide differently. The most common grouping sorts the factors that influence buying into cultural, social, personal and psychological, and many textbooks add situational ones. Your professor may use a different grouping, but the idea is the same.

This is where people get lost, because each group holds several concepts. The fix is a table with one row per concept and four columns:

• The concept and its group. For example, "reference groups, social".
• The definition in your own words. One sentence, not copied from the slide.
• How it differs from its neighbor. Attitude versus belief, motivation versus need, culture versus subculture. This column is the one that saves you on multiple choice.
• An example from a real purchase. Specific, brand name and all.

The psychological factors deserve their own table, since they're the most theoretical: motivation (with Maslow's hierarchy, which is almost always there), perception, learning, beliefs and attitudes. For each one, also write what a company can do with it. If perception is selective, for instance, a brand has to fight for its ad to be one of the few you actually notice.

One concept, two purchases

Definitions in this course fade fast if they stay abstract. What makes them stick is an example, and two is better: one purchase of yours and one of someone else's.

Yours helps you understand. Think about the last time you bought something expensive: what triggered the need? Where did you look for information? Which brands did you compare, and why did you drop the others? Did you regret it a little afterward? That story, told with the course's vocabulary, is the best study note you can have.

Someone else's keeps you from assuming everyone shops like you. The way you shop is one data point, not the rule. Pick someone different from you (another age, another budget, another relationship with the brand) and tell the same purchase from their side. If your course works with segments or personas, this is direct practice for the exam.

Put the definition on one side of a flashcard and the two examples on the other, and review them with the answer covered. Recalling without looking sticks better than rereading, and in a course full of look-alike concepts, it's the fastest way to find out which ones you're still mixing up.

Case studies: diagnose first

A lot of professors grade with case studies: a brand, a problem (sales are dropping, a new product won't take off, customers buy once and never come back) and a prompt to analyze it with the theory and recommend something.

The most common mistake is jumping straight to the recommendation. A method that keeps the analysis in order:

1. Place the problem in the process. At which stage are people dropping off? If nobody knows the brand, the problem is in the information search. If they buy and don't come back, it's after the purchase.
2. Find the factors that explain it. With your table next to you, pick two or three that really apply and justify why. Explaining two well beats name-dropping ten.
3. Only then, recommend. Every recommendation has to answer the factor you found. If the problem is post-purchase dissonance, the answer isn't more advertising: it's follow-up, a warranty or good customer service.

Graders look for the full chain: problem, stage, factor, recommendation. Marketing cases in general have their own method, which I covered in the marketing post; what's specific here is that the diagnosis always runs through the decision process. If you're also taking advertising, you'll notice a good creative brief starts with exactly this diagnosis.

Researching consumers: the project

The course often comes with a research project: interviews, a small survey, watching how people shop in a store. It's the part students enjoy most and the part they leave for the last week.

Three tips so it doesn't turn into a problem:

• Start with the question, not the survey. Decide first what you want to know (why people pick one coffee brand over another), and only then what to ask.
• Don't rely only on what people say. What someone tells you about how they shop doesn't always match what they do. If you can, combine asking with observing.
• Tie every finding to a concept. A project with interesting data and no theory is only halfway there. Everything you find should have its course term next to it.

It's the same care with market research you'll see in a sales and marketing program, except that here what matters is why people buy, not how big the market is.

The lecture slides

Much of this course arrives as slide decks full of similar concepts, a Maslow pyramid, a diagram of the buying process and screenshots of ads the professor talked through in class. The PDF keeps the headings and the images; what was said about each ad, it doesn't.

For that part you can use Filmina, a web app that explains your lecture slides out loud, one at a time, pointing at the part it's talking about. It also looks at each slide as an image, so it explains the diagram or the ad along with the text. If two concepts blur together, you ask Mina, the chat that answers from your own material ("what's the difference between an attitude and a belief?"), and then you can practice with questions built from what it explained. It has limits: it needs a connection, a scanned deck gets read from the image and may contain mistakes, and the case analysis is still on you.

Frequently asked questions

What do you learn in a consumer behavior class?

How and why people choose, buy and use products and services. The core is the consumer decision process and the cultural, social, personal and psychological factors that shape it, with concepts like motivation, perception, attitudes and reference groups.

What are the five stages of the consumer decision process?

Need recognition, information search, evaluation of alternatives, purchase decision and post-purchase behavior. In low-involvement purchases, some stages go by almost without noticing.

How do you pass consumer behavior?

Build a table of concepts and how they differ, learn each one with a real purchase as the example, and practice case studies by placing the problem in a stage of the process before recommending anything. Review with flashcards, answer covered, especially the look-alike concepts.

Is there math in consumer behavior?

Very little. Some basic statistics may come up if the course includes a survey project, but what's graded is the theory and how you apply it to cases.