Chapter Overview

We have briefly overviewed the question of how and why we learn about consumers in this chapter. Consumer behavior research is concerned with systematically collecting and analyzing information in order to improve the quality of exchanges between organizations and their customers or constituents. That is, organizations create value by improving the quality of exchanges. Consumer behavior research is undergoing dramatic change because of speed, globalization, the Internet and data overload. The consumer researcher of this century will need to work smarter, faster and have more diverse skills than ever before. We distinguish between basic and applied research, and explain exploratory, descriptive, and causal research. There are five main steps in the research process. We give examples of the steps we go through in conducting consumer research and point out some of the key areas of concern in interpreting and using market intelligence. We stress that the research process is iterative, different methods and perspectives lead to different research results, and no consumer research is perfect. Because collecting verbal and written information from consumers is so central to the research process and because it throws many important issues in the research process into relief, we devote considerable attention to the problem of asking questions effectively. We mention three main considerations in developing questions and introduce the BRONS guidelines for effective question development. Conducting international consumer research is even more complicated than conducting consumer research in a single, national context, so we also explore some of the problems encountered in cross-cultural consumer research. Here, we review special problems associated with conceptual equivalence, and sources of response bias. The Internet is likely to have a dramatic impact on how consumer research is done over the next five years. We also provide a discussion of how this technology is changing consumer research in this chapter. Collecting and analyzing information about consumer behavior raises a host of ethical questions. We briefly review some of these issues and provide guidelines for conducting ethical research. Finally, we invite you to enter the exciting world of consumer research and point out that most of what you read in this textbook is a result of consumer behavior research.