Consumer Behaviour<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\nThe study of people as they relate to marketplaces<\/p>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
What this definition gains in tidiness it loses in proactive myth-busting, so let’s unpack it a little further what do we mean by ‘people’ and ‘relating to marketplaces’?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
People<\/h4>\n\n\n\n
People are the basic unit of analysis for CB. They are the ‘C’ in ‘CB’. People can be studied as individuals, as groups (such as fan-clubs), or even as entire cultures, but the focus is very much on those people.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
To be fair, CB does often ask questions about organizations (mostly firms), but it’s almost always about how they relate to consumers. So we might ask what firms are offering (to consumers), or what their offer should be (to consumers), or how they should talk about their product (to consumers)… consumers are never far from these questions. If we wander too far off into the mechanics of how firms operate, or how they relate to other firms, then we are starting to shift into neighbouring areas such as strategy, B2B marketing (‘Business to Business’), or services.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
To be clear, consumer researchers do often flirt with these lines – in this very book we have a chapter on organizational buyer behaviour. But this is CB pushing up against its edges, rather than its core focus<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Marketplaces<\/h4>\n\n\n\n
A “marketplace<\/strong>” is any place where humans exchange things – usually with money, but not always.<\/p>\n\n\n\nMost of us think of “marketplaces”, as basically just shops. It’s easy to visualize exchanging money for a toaster, or for our fingernails to be painted, or for a new skin for our video game avatar. Most of these transactions take place in shops (online or in person), but they can also happen in slightly less obvious places such as neighbourhood garage sales, auction houses, or sites like eBay, Taobao, Kajiji, Craig’s List, Freecycle, or Gumtree.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
There are other marketplaces we engage with too, though, they are just hidden slightly better. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Hidden marketplaces<\/h5>\n\n\n\n
Voting is a political marketplace: In return for marking an ‘X’ next to someone’s name, they promise to do things you might care about, like changing tax rates or helping homeless people, etc.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
There is another currency that most of us spend every single day, without even realizing it: our attention. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Every time you search for cat images or muffin recipes, your search engine (be it Google, Baidu, Yandex, etc) gives you answers in return for exposing you to adverts. Your attention is worth money to them. This is also true when you watch TV or visit websites like blogs or news sites. A similar exchange even happens on state-owned broadcasters that don’t run any adverts (like the British, Canadian, or Australian Broadcasting Corporations) – they use their viewership numbers to justify receiving public funding. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
The same is true of social media. When you receive entertainment (or information or outrage) by reading other people’s posts, looking at their pictures, or watching their videos, then the content creator receives views in return – and possibly also comments, likes, clicks, followers, subscriptions, etc. For some content creators that follower count is a reward all on its own#up. For others, it can be further “monetized” where they get paid a share of the advertising revenue from their views (or can sell “merch” to their viewers – mugs, shirts, etc).<\/p>\n\n\n
\n
#down. A few years ago Twitter went on a campaign of deleting 'bot' accounts. This produced a wave of outrage from users who were upset that their follower counts had gone down - it didn't seem to matter that the followers they had 'lost' weren't actual humans<\/pre>\n<\/div><\/div>\n\n\nWe may not think of our TV or internet use as being a ‘marketplace’, because we might not see the exchange happening – but it is there. The difference is that these are “attention economies” – that is the currency being spent instead of money.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
How we relate to marketplaces<\/h5>\n\n\n\n
CB takes a very inclusive definition of how people ‘relate’ to markets, from the most obvious and immediate market activities (buying, selling, trading, browsing, etc), to more subtle thoughts and feelings that come before, during, and afterward, to the very distant echos of its downstream consequences (i.e., how you dispose of the item you bought many years ago).<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Examples of things CB might study:<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n- How do firms put prices on sports events<\/li>\n\n\n\n
- What different motivations people have for browsing second-hand vintage markets <\/li>\n\n\n\n
- The deep personal connections people form to items they inherited from their parents or grandparents<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n\n\n\n
There is always some form of link to a market exchange, but CB is generally fine with that link being pretty distant and tenuous.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
What is it? What should a CB person learn? What do CB people do?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":529,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"chapter":[7],"exclude_from_index":[16],"class_list":["post-528","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","chapter-0-intro","exclude_from_index-include"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/illuminated-text.com\/cb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/528","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/illuminated-text.com\/cb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/illuminated-text.com\/cb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/illuminated-text.com\/cb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/illuminated-text.com\/cb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=528"}],"version-history":[{"count":19,"href":"https:\/\/illuminated-text.com\/cb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/528\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2881,"href":"https:\/\/illuminated-text.com\/cb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/528\/revisions\/2881"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/illuminated-text.com\/cb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/529"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/illuminated-text.com\/cb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=528"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/illuminated-text.com\/cb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=528"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/illuminated-text.com\/cb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=528"},{"taxonomy":"chapter","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/illuminated-text.com\/cb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/chapter?post=528"},{"taxonomy":"exclude_from_index","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/illuminated-text.com\/cb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/exclude_from_index?post=528"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}