Understanding Consumer Decision Making

This edited volume will help business and academic researchers understand the means-end approach to understanding consumers. This is a qualitative marketing research method to gain customer insight into decision making.

The goal of this book is to help business managers and academic researchers understand the means-end perspective and the methods by which it is used, and to demonstrate how to use the means-end approach to develop better marketing and advertising strategy. The authors discuss methodological issues regarding interviewing and coding, present applications of the means-end approach to marketing and advertising problems, and describe the conceptual foundations of the means-end approach. This book is of interest to academic researchers in marketing and related fields, graduate students in business, marketing research professionals, and business managers. It is intended as a reference book containing ideas about the means-end approach and its applications.

The Handbook of Marketing Research: Uses, Misuses, and Future Advances comprehensively explores the approaches for delivering market insights for fact-based decision making in a market-oriented firm. Divided into four parts, the Handbook addresses (1) the different nuances of delivering insights; (2) quantitative, qualitative, and online data gathering techniques; (3) basic and advanced data analysis methods; and (4) the substantial marketing issues that clients are interested in resolving through marketing research.

The fragmented information that consumers receive about the nutritional value and health risks associated with fish and shellfish can result in confusion or misperceptions about these food sources. Consumers are therefore confronted with a dilemma: they are told that seafood is good for them and should be consumed in large amounts, while at the same time the federal government and most states have issued advisories urging caution in the consumption of certain species or seafood from specific waters. Seafood Choices carefully explores the decision-making process for selecting seafood by assessing the evidence on availability of specific nutrients (compared to other food sources) to obtain the greatest nutritional benefits. The book prioritizes the potential for adverse health effects from both naturally occurring and introduced toxicants in seafood; assesses evidence on the availability of specific nutrients in seafood compared to other food sources; determines the impact of modifying food choices to reduce intake of toxicants on nutrient intake and nutritional status within the U.S. population; develops a decision path for U.S. consumers to weigh their seafood choices to obtain nutritional benefits balanced against exposure risks; and identifies data gaps and recommendations for future research. The information provided in this book will benefit food technologists, food manufacturers, nutritionists, and those involved in health professions making nutritional recommendations.

This text takes a strategic approach to consumer behavior; that is, once you know how consumers behave and react, what do you do about it? New to this edition is a much needed balance between the strategic approach and consumer rights and social implications.

Inhaltsangabe:Abstract: The idea of understanding consumer behaviour as a sequential decision-making process is one that is common in marketing. The decision-making process itself is presented as a logical flow of activities, working from problem recognition to purchase to post-purchase evaluation. This decision-making process is affected by a number of other more complex influences. Some of these influences relate to the wider environment in which the decision is being made while others relate to the individual who makes the decision. In this context, .. [o]ne of the most widely accepted notions in consumer behavior is that word-of-mouth communication (hereafter WOM) plays an important role in shaping consumers' attitudes and behaviors. More specifically, WOM communications between consumers are a topic of interest in both the pre-purchase and post-purchase decision-making literature. Research into the diffusion of innovations has focused on modelling the role of WOM in product adoption at various stages of the diffusion process. WOM has also been studied as a mechanism through which consumers convey both informational and normative influences in the product evaluation. Finally, WOM has been identified as an important post-purchase complaining option. Although WOM plays an important role in consumer pre-purchase and post-purchase decision-making, research into this phenomenon has been fragmented. Importantly, relatively little attention has been directed at understanding key issues with respect to WOM recommendation sources and the factors that influence their use. The aim of the present work is to add to this small body of empirical research. The main part of this paper is divided into two chapters. Chapter 2, that follows an introduction to the work, is a theoretical one. It is a review of the literature on consumer decision-making and the individual and environmental influences on it. Emphasis is being placed on WOM communication and its role in understanding consumer behaviour. Chapter 3 focuses on the choice of WOM recommendation sources. Empirical research is presented which explores the influences on the choice over WOM recommendation sources. Finally, concluding remarks and recommendations for further research can be found in chapter 4. Inhaltsverzeichnis:Table of Contents: Chapter 1: Introduction1 Chapter 2: Literature Review3 2.1Consumer Decision-Making3 2.1.1The Decision-Making Process4 2.1.1.1Problem [...]