120 The Marketing Book
fashion, buying only after long deliberation
and evaluation; others prefer a more impulsive
approach, buying many products on trial and
possibly discarding them quickly in favour of
other novelties. The style of consumer decision
making has far-reaching potential implications
for consumers’ awareness, their openness to
marketing information and the ways in which
they use it, the purchase decisions they make,
and the probability that they will become brand
or product loyal. Finally, the situational context
in which consumer behaviour occurs needs to
receive detailed attention.
The modern message of marketing is that
the needs of the consumer are paramount and
those of the producer contingent. So, before we
examine the process, involvement and style of
consumer behaviour, let’s ask why marketers
should be interested in all this. Marketing has
been defined in a somewhat basic way as
whatever comes between production and con-
sumption, the distribution of products and
services to those who buy them. Only sub-
sistence economies, where everything is
quickly consumed by the family that produces
it, can escape making provision for marketing
in this fundamental sense. More structured
economies, even if they emphasize barter, must
tailor production in some degree to the wants
of its recipients. They must also make provision
for the storage and physical handling of goods
and for informing likely consumers about
them. The invention of money made economic
exchange easier, though more uncertain, for the
wants of consumers had to be anticipated
before market transactions occurred, perhaps
even before production took place. The affluent
market economies with which we are familiar
today put even greater stress on understanding
the consumer, on supplying what he or she will
buy rather than what the manufacturer hap-
pens to be able to supply or thinks is good for
the customer.
A popular view claims, however, that
marketing is largely a matter of persuading or
even duping customers into parting with their
money for products and services they do not
want, let alone need. All the paraphernalia of
market research, advertising, retail design and
credit provision are seen as manipulating the
hapless consumer by removing their discretion
and making their decisions for them. Of course,
marketing can be a powerful force, commu-
nicating ideas and practices to a population
that might otherwise remain unaware of them,
providing goods that might otherwise be
unthought of, ‘taking the waiting out of want-
ing’. No responsible society ought to allow
these activities to go unmonitored, nor abuses
unchecked, and none does. The network of
voluntary and mandatory provisions for the
regulation of advertising should be enough to
convince us of that.
The influence of marketing is limited in a
more fundamental way. Most new consumer
products are launched only after the most
thorough development process in which they
are tested physically, functionally and in
terms of their acceptability to consumers. It is
true, as the critics allege, that market research,
product development and marketing commu-
nications are all planned and executed with
professional expertise. Yet, even after all the
pre-launch testing, test marketing and market-
ing planning that accompanies most con-
sumer product entries, the majority fail at the
stage of customer acceptance. Not because the
creation and delivery of these products is
poor – we have noted that they are highly
sophisticated procedures – but because con-
sumers have choice.
As a result, modern marketing links pro-
duction and consumption in a particular way,
a managerial style known as consumer-ori-
entated management. Unless a firm enjoys a
monopoly, its managers have little discretion
in the matter of adopting a consumer-ori-
entated approach. Consumer affluence and
competition among suppliers give buyers
enormous discretion over what they buy, from
whom they buy it, and how they pay. They
have discretion not only over what they
spend their money on, but to whom they
listen, by whom they are persuaded. And it