Glossary of Consumer Behavior Terms

Glossary of

Consumer Behavior Terms

ABC: Affect Behaviour Cognition

Absolute threshold: The lowest level at which a stimulus can be detected 50% of the time.

Acceptable risk: The level of risk that a consumer will tolerate when purchasing a product or service.

Acculturation: The difficult task of learning a new culture.

Acquisition phase: The first of three phases of consumer buying-acquisition, consumption, and disposition. It is

associated with search and selection of goods and services.

Actual product performance: A consumer's perception of the level of performance displayed by a product. Actual

performance is compared to expected performance to determine product satisfaction.

Adaptation: A process in which an organism has repeated experience with a stimulus and habituates to it.

Adaptation level: The level of intensity of a stimulus to which a consumer has become accustomed or adapted

Advertising clutter: Too many ads on TV or radio impeding the ability of consumers to remember the ads.

Advertising wear-out: Occurs when consumers are overexposed to an advertisement, resulting in decreased

positivity.

Affect: A class of mental phenomena uniquely characterized by a consciously experienced, subjective feeling state,

commonly accompanying emotions and moods.

Affect and CS/D: The concept that the level of consumer satisfaction is influenced by the positive and negative

affective responses elicited by a product after its purchase and during use.

Affect intensity: The stable tendency of some people to react more strongly than others to an emotion-producing

situation.

Affect-referral heuristic: A rule of thumb in which a consumer chooses a product based upon an overall

recollection of his or her emotional response of an alternative.

Asian-American subculture: The fastest-growing ethnic subculture in the United States.

AIO statements: Used in psychographic inventories to obtain information on consumers' activities, interests, and

opinions.

Alternative evaluation: The formation of benefits and attitudes regarding choice alternatives.

Anchoring and adjustment: A judgmental heuristic that is used to make an estimate of the level of a stimulus on a

scale. The level is estimated by starting at some reference point and then adjusting away from it.

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Antecedent states: The temporary physiological and mood states that a consumer brings to a consumption situation.

Applied behavior analysis: A process in which environmental variables are manipulated to alter behavior.

Articulation: A component of consumer knowledge that describes how finely a person can discriminate differences

along a dimension.

Aspiration group: A group to which an individual would like to belong. If it is impossible for the individual to

belong to the group, it becomes a symbolic group for the person.

Assimilation effect: The idea that a communication may be viewed as more congruent with the position of the

receiver than it really is because it falls within the latitude of acceptance.

ATSCI: (attention to social comparison information) a scale that measures the disposition to conform.

Attention: The allocation of cognitive capacity to an object or task, so that information is consciously processed.

Attention stage: The stage of information processing in which a person allocates cognitive capacity to a stimulus.

Attitude: The amount of affect or feeling for or against a stimulus.

Attitude toward the ad: A consumer's positive and negative feelings held toward a particular advertisement.

Attitude toward the behavior: A consumer's positive and negative feelings held toward engaging in a particular

behavior.

Attribute-object belief: The belief that an object possesses a particular attribute.

Attributes: The characteristics or features that an object may or may not have.

Attribution theory: Identifies the various means through which people determine the causes of action of

themselves, others, and objects.

Autonomic decisions: Decisions of lesser importance that either the husband or wife may make independently

Awareness set: A subset of the total universe of potential brands and products available of which a consumer is

aware.

Baby-boom generation: The large post-World War 11 group of people born between 1946 and 1964

Back translation: A process involving successive translations of a message back- and forth between languages by

different translators. In this way, subtle and not-so-subtle differences in meaning can be located.

Balance theory: A type of cognitive consistency approach in which people are viewed as maintaining a logical and

consistent set of interconnected beliefs.

Basic exchange equation: Profit = Rewards - Costs.

Behavioral economics: An approach to economics based upon the investigation of the behavior of individual

consumers. An example is the use of survey research methods to assess the economic confidence of consumers.



Behavioral Influence Techniques: Techniques that cause people to comply to requests by making use of strong

norms of behavior.

Behavioral learning: A process in which experience with the environment leads to a relatively permanent change in

behavior or the potential for a change in behavior.

Behavioral segmentation: A complementary approach to using demographic variables to segment the market by

dividing consumers into homogeneous groups based on various aspects of their buying behavior.

Beliefs: The cognitive knowledge people have of the relations among attributes, benefits, and objects.

Bem sex-role inventory: An inventory for exploring gender roles. It identifies three possible roles- masculine,

feminine, and psychologically androgynous.

Benefit segmentation: The division of the market into relatively homogeneous groups of consumers based upon

similarities of needs.

Benefits: The outcomes that product or service attributes may provide.

Binational products: Products that are mad in one country and assembles in another country, or designed in one

country and manufactured in another.

Bogies: Fear rumors that may spook the marketplace.

Bookend ads: Advertisements placed in the first and last position of a series of commercials.

Brand commitment: The emotional-psychological attachment to a brand within a product class.

Brand expectations: The expectations that a consumer forms regarding the performance of a brand.

Brand knowledge: The amount of experience with and information that a person has about particular products or

services. Consumers possessing greater amounts of knowledge can think about a product across a number of

dimensions and make finer distinctions among brands.

Brand loyalty: The biased behavioral response, expressed to a degree to which a customer holds a positive attitude

toward a brand, has a commitment to it and intends to continue purchasing it in the future.

Buying unit: The individual, family, or group that makes a purchase decision.

CAD model: A personality scale developed to measure the interpersonal orientation of consumers. CAD stands for

compliance, aggression, and detachment.

Central cues: Those ideas and supporting data that bear directly on the quality of the arguments developed in the

message.

Central route to persuasion: In high-involvement information processing, a path to persuasion in which a person

diligently processes the arguments of the source of information.

Channels: The media through which information flows.

Childhood consumer socialization: Processes by which young people acquire skills, knowledge, and attitudes

relevant to their functioning as consumers in the marketplace.



Choice: The process in which consumers make a choice between two or more alternative courses of action.

Choice uncertainty: The degree of uncertainty about which of several brands to select.

Classical conditioning: A type of learning in which a conditioned stimulus is paired with an unconditioned stimulus

through repetition, the conditioned stimulus will eventually elicit a conditioned response.

Closure: A principle of perceptual organization that describes the tendency of people to fill in missing information

to create a holistic

Cluster analysis: The use of demographic variables to identify where groups of neighborhoods with households of

similar consumers arc located geographically.

Clutter: An overabundance of advertisements that decreases communications effectiveness.

Cognitive dissonance: An unpleasant emotional state that is felt when there is a logical inconsistency among

cognitive elements.

Cognitive learning: The process through which people form associations among concepts, learn sequences of

concepts, solve problems and gain insights.

Cognitive responses: The thoughts that consumers may develop in response to messages.

Cognitive personality theories: Personality theories positing that individual differences result from variations in

how people process information, think, and learn.

Commitment: The degree to which an attitude position can be changed. As the level of commitment to an attitude

position increases, it becomes more difficult to change the attitude.

Communication: The use of a sign to convey meaning. A sign may be a verbalization, an utterance, a body

movement, a written word, a picture, an odor, a touch, or even stones on the ground to denote a property boundary.

Communications model: A model stating that sources encode messages that travel through a channel and are

processed by receivers, who then provide feedback to the source.

Comparative appraisal: The consumer's evaluation of his or her own relative standing with respect to an attitude,

belief, ability, or emotion through observation of the behavior of appropriate reference others.

Comparative messages: Messages in which the communicator compares the positive and negative aspects of his or

her position to the positive and negative aspects of a competitor's position.

Comparison level: The minimum level of positive outcome (profit) that an individual feels he or she deserves from

an exchange.

Comparison level for alternatives: The lowest level of outcomes a person will accept in light of available

alternative opportunities.

Comparison level for outcomes: The minimum level of positive outcomes a person believes he or she deserves

from in exchange.

Complaint behavior: The overt actions taken by consumers to bring their product or service dissatisfaction to the

attention of others.



Complementary activities: Activities that naturally take place together.

Complex exchange: An exchange that involves a set of three or more actors enmeshed in a set of mutual relations.

Compliance: The act of conforming to the wishes of another person or group without necessarily accepting the

group's dictates.

Comprehension: The process of making sense of stimuli so that the message may be understood.

Comprehension stage: The stage of information processing in which the person organizes and interprets

information in order to obtain meaning from it.

Compulsive consumption: Consumption marked by an impulse or urge to engage in behavior that may be harmful

to the consumer while simultaneously denying its possible negative effects.

Compulsive purchases: Purchases marked by an impulse or urge to engage in behavior that may be harmful to the

consumer while simultaneously denying its possible negative effects.

Compound traits: Predispositions that result from the effects of multiple elemental traits, a person’s learning

history and the cultural environment.

Concept testing: The pre-testing of the product idea.

Conformity: A change in behavior or belief as a result of real or imagined group or individual pressure.

Conservation behavior: Action Consumers take to conserve resources, including curtailment behaviors,

maintenance behaviors, and efficiency behaviors.

Consumer actions: Those behaviors in which consumers engage in the acquisition, consumption, and disposition of

goods, services, and ideas.

Consumer acquisitions: The goods, services, and ideas that consumers obtain in the marketplace.

Consumer behavior: The study of the decision-making units and the processes involved in acquiring, consuming,

and disposing of goods, services, experiences, and ideas.

Consumer behaviors: consist of all the actions taken by consumers related to acquiring, disposing, and using

products and services.

Consumer beliefs: The cognitive knowledge people have of the relations among attributes, benefits, and objects.

Consumer complaint behavior: A multiple set of actions triggered by perceived dissatisfaction with a purchase

episode.

Consumer decision making: The analysis made in choosing between two or more alternative acquisitions and the

processes that take place before and after the choice.

Consumer environment: It is composed of factors existing independently of individual consumers and firms that

influence the exchange process.

Consumer ethnocentrism: A scale measuring the tendency of consumers to prefer to purchase U.S.-made products.



Consumer expectations: A person's prior beliefs about what should happen in a given situation.

Consumer incentives: The products, services, information, and even other people that are perceived to satisfy a

need.

Consumer information processing: The process in which consumers are exposed to information, attend to it,

comprehend it, place it in memory, and retrieve it for later use.

Consumer involvement: The perceived personal importance and/or interest consumers attach to the acquisition,

consumption and disposition of a good, a service or an idea.

Consumer knowledge: The amount of experience and information that a person has about particular products or

services.

Consumer performance: An event in which a consumer and a marketer act as performers and/or as audience in a

situation in which obligations and standards exist.

Consumer primacy: The concept that the consumer should be at the center of the marketing effort.

Consumer rights: The rights, identified by John F. Kennedy, of safety, information, redress, and choice. More

recently some have suggested that the right to health care and the right to a home should be added to the list.

Consumer ritual: Standardized sequences of actions that are periodically repeated.

Consumer satisfaction/ dissatisfaction: The general feelings that a consumer develops about a product or service

after its purchase and use.

Consumer search behavior: All actions consumers take to identify and obtain information on the means of solving

a problem.

Consumer self-control: The ability of people to avoid making purchases that involve pleasure in the present, but

pain in the future.

Consumer situations: The temporary environmental and personal factors that form the context within which a

consumer activity occurs at a particular place and time.

Consumer well-being: The extent to which an individual's needs and wants are satisfied.

Consumerism: The movement made up of activities of government, business, independent organizations, and

concerned consumers that are designed to protect the rights of consumers.

Consumption amount. The amount of a good that is consumed. For example, how many ounces of a soft drink is

consumed.

Consumption experience: The cognitions and feelings the consumer experiences during the use of a product or

service.

Consumption purpose: The reason for using a product. That is, some products can be used for multiple purposes.

Thus, baking soda can be used as an antacid, to make bread rise, and to reduce odors.

Context: The background factors within which consumer behavior occurs.



Continuous innovations: A modification of an existing product to improve performance, taste, reliability, and so

forth. Continuous innovations result in few, if any, consumer life-style changes.

Contracted performance: Both the consumer and marketer have minimal interactions. It occurs with low-

involvement goods.

Country of origin: The country from which a good or service originates.

Contrast effects: Occur when the attitude statement falls into the latitude of rejection, so that it is perceived as more

opposed to the receiver's position than perhaps it really is.

Conventions: Norms that describe how to act in everyday life.

Corporate social responsibility: The idea that business has an obligation to help society with its problems by

offering resources.

Corrective advertising: Advertising that is mandated by a federal agency to correct consumer impressions that

were formed by previously misleading advertising.

Cross-cultural analysis: The study of foreign cultures and their values, attitudes, languages, and customs.

Crowding: Unpleasant feelings that people experience when they perceive that densities are too high and that their

control of the situation has been reduced acceptable levels.

Cultural identification: A feeling of attachment to the society in which a person prefers to live.

Cultural meanings: Cultural ideas transferred to consumers through material goods and rituals.

Cultural rituals: Standardized sequences of actions that are periodically repeated. They have some purpose and

generally have a beginning, middle, and end. They provide meaning and involve the use of cultural symbols.

Cultural symbols: Entities that represent the shared ideas and concepts of a culture.

Cultural values: They represent the shared meanings ideal end-states.

Culture: A set of socially acquired behavior patterns transmitted symbolically through language and other means to

the members of a particular society. It is a way of life.

Customs: Handed down from generation to generation, customs refers to basic actions such as the ceremonies held

and the roles played by the sexes.

Decision process: The steps through which consumers move when purchasing a product or service, including

problem recognition, search, alternative evaluation, choice, and postacquisition evaluation.

Decreasing marginal utility: The concept that, as a consumer obtains more of something, each additional unit

brings less utility or satisfaction.

De marketing: Attempts by regulatory agencies and non-profit organizations to reduce the frequency of consumer

behaviors that have a negative impact on the consumer or society.

Demographic characteristics: Age, sex, income, religion, marital status, education, etc.



Demographic variables: Characteristics of various groups of people as assessed by such factors as age, sex,

income, religion, marital status, nationality, education, family size, occupation, and ethnicity.

Density: How closely packed consumers are in a particular situational context.

Difference threshold: The minimum amount of difference in the intensity of a stimulation that can be detected 50%

of the time.

Diffusion: The process by which innovative ideas, products and services spread through the consumer population.

Direct influence of attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors: The concept that attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors may be

formed directly.

Dissociative group: A reference group with whom the person does not wish to be associated.

Dissonance: An imbalanced state that results when a logical inconsistency exists among cognitive elements.

Dogmatism: A personality characteristic marked by closed-mindedness and rigidity in the, approach to the social

environment.

Drive: An affective state in which a person experiences emotions and physiological arousal.

Dyadic exchange: An exchange that takes place between two parties.

Dynamic continuous innovations: Innovations that involve some major change in an existing product and minor

changes in the behavior of consumers.

East Asia: Composed of Japan, Korea, China, and Southeast Asia, the region has over 26% of the world's

population and is the dominant exporter of automobiles, electronics, and computer chips.

Economic cycle: The cycle that traces the flow of an economy. It has four phases–peak, recession, trough, and

recovery.

Economic environment: The set of factors involving monetary, natural, and human resources that influence the

behavior of individuals and groups.

Ego: The component of the personality defined in psychoanalytic theory as standing for reason and good sense and

as following the reality principle.

Elemental Traits: The most basis underlying predispositions of individuals that arise from genetics and early

learning history.

Encoding: The process of transferring information from short-term to long-term memory for permanent storage.

Enculturation: The process of learning one's own culture.

Enduring involvement: Occurs when consumers show a consistent high level of interest in a product and

frequently spend time thinking about the product.

Environmental analysis: The assessment of the forces and institutions external to the firm and of how these may

influence the marketing effort.



Environmental influence factors: Those factors outside the individual that affect individual consumers, decision

making units and marketers.

Environmental level of analysis: Analysis of those factors outside of the person that influence consumer behavior,

such as the effects of situations, groups, culture, subcultures, and the regulatory environment.

Ethical dilemma: A decision that involves the trade-off of lowering one's personal values in exchange for increased

organizational and personal profits.

Ethnocentrism: The universal tendency for people to view their own group as the center of the universe, to interpret

other social units from the perspective of their own group, and to reject persons who are culturally dissimilar similar.

Euroconsumers: Consumers in Western Europe who supposedly share common desires for a broad range of goods

and services. This assumption is incorrect.

Evoked set: Consists of those brands and products recalled from long-term memory that are acceptable for further

consideration.

Exchange: The transfer of something tangible or intangible, actual or symbolic, between two or more social actors.

Exchange process: A process in which resources are transferred between two parties.

Exchange rituals: Rituals in which products or services are exchanged among consumers.

Expectations: A person's prior beliefs about what should happen in a given situation.

Expected product performance: The level of performance anticipated of a product or service by a consumer.

Exposure: The initial information-processing stage, in which consumers receive information through their senses.

Extended family: Consists of the nuclear family plus other relatives, such as parents of the husband and wife.

Extended self: The concept that possessions may become 1 part of the self-concept and, therefore, extend the self to

include impersonal entities.

External search: The consumer's soliciting information from outside sources rather than from his or her memory.

Fads: Temporary fashion or other trends followed by a group.

Family decision stages: The steps in the decision process used by a family to purchase products or services.

Family life cycle: The idea that families may move through a series of stages in a developmental fashion.

Fashion: A set of behaviors temporarily adopted by a people because they are perceived to be socially appropriate

for the time and situation.

Fear appeals: A type of message in which the communication is designed to create some level of fear in the target

audience.

Feelings: The affective responses and emotions that consumers have.



Focus groups: Small number of consumers (usually 6 to 10), interacting in an open ended fashion with the

assistance of a moderator to provide information on their beliefs and attitudes about specific topics.

Formal exchange: an explicit written, or verbal contract. This will frequently occur in external exchanges.

Gatekeeper: An individual who has the ability to control information to a decision maker.

Geodemographics: The use of demographic variables to identify where consumers with similar buying patterns are

geographically concentrated.

Geographic segmentation: The segmentation of a market into homogeneous groups of consumers with similar

needs and wants based on Geography.

Global marketer: A marketer who attempts to develop "one sight, one sound, and one sell" for its products.

Global values: Enduring beliefs about desired states of existence or modes of behavior.

Goal-directed action: Behavior directed toward obtaining an incentive object, such as a product or service.

Goods: Tangible products.

Group: A set of individuals who interact with one another over some period of time and who share some common

need or goal.

Group polarization phenomenon: The tendency of groups to be either more risky or more cautious than

individuals when making decisions.

Group shift: The tendency of group decisions to show either more or less risk-taking propensities than the average

of the decisions of the individuals in the group.

Habitual purchases: Purchases that occur as a result of a habit.

Halo effect: The concept that positive or negative feelings about one characteristic will generalize to influence

feelings about other, possibly unrelated, characteristics.

Heuristics: Simple rules of thumb people use to make estimates of probabilities and values.

High-involvement decision making: The decision process that occurs when consumers perceive high personal

importance in a decision. It is marked by extended decision making and high levels of information processing.

High-involvement hierarchy: The hierarchy of effects in which, belief formation occurs first, followed by the

creation of affect, followed by a behavior.

Higher-order conditioning: Occurs when a conditioned stimulus acts to classically condition another, previously

neutral stimulus.

Household: A group of people living under one roof.

Id: One of the three elements of the personality identified by Freud. The id is based upon the pleasure principle,

immediate gratification, and moves a person to obtain positive feelings and emotions.

Idea generation: The first stage of product development.



Ideal self: How a person would ideally like to perceive himself or herself.

Identification: The normal process through which children acquire appropriate social roles by consciously and

unconsciously copying the behavior of significant others.

Incentives: The products, services, and people that are perceived as satisfying needs.

Income effect: An economic principle stating that, when prices are lowered, consumers can afford more of a

product without giving up other alternatives.

Individual difference variables: They describe how one individual differs from another in distinctive patterns of

behavior.

Industrial marketing: The marketing of a product by one firm to another firm.

Industrial purchase behavior: The process corporations use to purchase goods, services, and ideas.

Inept set: Consists of the brands and products that are considered unacceptable.

Inert set: Consists of the brands and products to which consumers are essentially indifferent.

Influence: The attempt of one person to impact the behaviors, attitudes, or beliefs of another person.

Informal exchange: Unwritten social contracts are created between parties. Occurring more frequently

in internal exchanges, social norms and peer pressure replace formal contracts.

Information salience: The level of activation of a stimulus in memory.

Informational influence: One method through which a group may influence an individual, in which the group

provides highly credible information that influences the consumer’s purchase decision.

Instrumental role: Within a group, the role filled by the person who deals with the problem of getting the group to

achieve certain goals and complete certain tasks.

Instrumental values: Behaviors and actions required to achieve various terminal states.

Integrated group: A category within the VALS psychographic inventory that describes consumers who are mature

and balanced and who have managed to "put together" the best characteristics of the inner and outer personalities.

Interaction: Occurs when two or more factors combine to cause a consumer to behave in a different manner than if

the two factors were not combined.

Interaction set: Those stores where a consumers allows himself or herself to be exposed to personal selling.

Internal exchange: Exchanges that occur between parties within a group.

Internal roles: Duties inside the family.

Interpretation: A process whereby people draw upon their experience, memory, and expectations to interpret and

attach meaning to a stimulus.



Intrinsic satisfaction: Satisfaction that results from an internal interest in doing something, rather than from the

external benefits of doing it.

Involvement: The level of perceived personal importance or interest evoked by a stimulus (or stimuli) within a

specific situation.

Involvement responses: The level of complexity of information processing and the extent of decision making by a

consumer.

Just-in-time (JIT) purchasing: A corporate philosophy associated with total quality management in which a

company seeks to purchase goods and services at the last possible minute prior to when they are required for the

production process.

Just noticeable difference (JND): The minimum amount of difference in the intensity of a stimulus that can be

detected 50% of the time.

Knowledge uncertainty: Consumers' uncertainty about the available features, their importance, and their

performance for alternative brands.

Learning through experience: The process of gaining knowledge through actual contact with products. Overall,

learning through experience is a more effective means to gain consumer knowledge.

Lifestyle: How people live, how they spend their money, and how they allocate their time. It is concerned with

consumers’ overt actions and behavior. (p. 220)

Life themes: They represent critical values and goals that influence consumers at different stages of their lives.

Likert scale: An attitude scale that involves asking a consumer to indicate the amount of his or her agreement or

disagreement with a statement.

Low-involvement hierarchy: The hierarchy of effects that occurs in low-involvement decision making, in which

beliefs are formed first, followed by behavior, and finally by attitude formation.

Lower Americans: A description of social class that refers to the combination of the upper-lower and lower-lower

social classes.

Lower-lower class: The lowest of the social classes. Members are typically out of work (or have the dirtiest jobs)

and include bums and common criminals.

Lower-upper class: The next to highest social class, composed of the newer social elite drawn from current

professional and corporate leadership.

Macrosegmentation: Identifying groups of companies having similar buying organizations and facing similar

buying situations.

Market mavens: Individuals who have information about many kinds of products, places to shop, and other facets

of markets. They initiate discussion with consumers and respond to requests from consumers for market

information.

Market research: Applied consumer research designed to provide management with information on factors that

affect consumers’ acquisition, consumption and disposition of goods, services and ideas.



Market segmentation: The subdivision of a market into distinct subsets of customers, where any subset may

conceivably be selected as a target market to be reached with a distinct marketing mix.

Market testing: placing a product into limited distribution to consumers in order to identify potential problems and

test the entire marketing mix.

Marketer: The firm, nonprofit organization, government agency, political candidate, or other consumer who wishes

to cause an exchange to occur.

Marketing: The human activity directed at satisfying needs and wants through human exchange processes.

Marketing concept: The view that an industry is a customer-satisfying process, not a goods-purchasing process.

Marketing environment: The totality of the forces and institutions that are external and potentially relevant to a

firm.

Marketing strategy: A strategy implemented by creating segmentation and positioning objectives for a product that

an organization or individual wishes to exchange with a consumer.

Match up effect: It states that endorsers are more effective in changing attitudes, beliefs and intentions when the

dominant characteristics of the product match the dominant features of a source.

Materialism: The importance a consumer attaches to worldly possessions, where at the highest levels possessions

assume a central place in life and provide the greatest sources of satisfaction and dissatisfaction.

Medium: The channel through which a message is passed.

Message characteristics: Those aspects of a message that influence consumer reactions, such as the use of humor

or fear appeals.

Message complexity: The complexity of information that a message contains.

Middle class: Average-income white-collar workers and their blue-collar friends who live on "the better side of

town" and try to "do the proper things."

Money: Currency accepted for use as a medium of exchange.

Motivation: An activated state within a person that leads to goal-directed behavior.

Motivation researcher: Researchers in the 1950s who employed a psychoanalytic approach to understanding

consumers by investigating fantasies, dreams, and symbols.

Myths: Stories that express key values and ideals of a society.

NAICS (North American Industry Classification System) A database that classifies groups of business firms that

produce the same type of product.

Need-driven person: A psychographic person identified in the VALS inventory who is characterized as striving

simply to meet basic food and housing needs.

Need for affiliation: A basic social need identified by McClelland that is similar in nature to Maslow's

belongingness need.



Need for power: A basic social need, identified by McClelland. It refers to the desire to obtain and exercise control

over others.

Need for uniqueness: The desires to perceive ourselves as different and original.

Needs: Result from a discrepancy between an actual and a desired state of being.

Need recognition: It occurs when a person perceives that there is a discrepancy between an actual and a desired

state of being.

Negativity bias: The finding that negative information is given more weight than positive information by consumers

when they make decisions to buy a product or service.

Nuclear family: Consists of a husband, wife, and their offspring.

Objects: The products, people, companies, and things about which people hold beliefs and attitudes.

Observational learning: A process in which people develop "patterns of behavior" by observing the actions of

others. (Also called vicarious or social learning

Occupational demographics: The area that focuses on the jobs Americans hold and on the past and future changes

in these jobs.

Opinion leader: Consumers who influence the purchase decisions of others.

Opportunity cost: The concept that, when a person buys a product or engages in one task, he or she simultaneously

forgoes buying another product or engaging in another task.

Organization: Deals with how people perceive the shapes, forms, figures, and lines in their visual world.

Organizational buying center: The people in an organization who participate in a buying decision and who share

the risks and goals of that decision.

Organizational buying situations: Researchers have identified three fundamental task definitions for

organizational buying situations-new task, modified rebuy, and straight rebuy.

Organizational culture: The shared values and beliefs that enable members to understand their roles and the norms

of the organization.

Outcomes: The results of an exchange that a person assesses in relation to the inputs to determine if the exchange

was equitable.

Pacific Rim: The countries that are situated on the Pacific Ocean.

Paired-associate learning: The learning of pairs of words or concepts by attempting to associate them with each

other.

Perceived freedom: A motivational need experienced by people to maintain their behavioral freedom.

Perceived risk: A consumer's perception of the overall negativity of a course of action based upon an assessment of

the possible negative outcomes and on the likelihood that those outcomes will occur.



Perceived Value: The trade-off consumers make between perceived quality and perceived price when evaluating a

brand.

Perception: The process through which individuals are exposed to information, attend to that information and

comprehend it.

Perceptual maps: A map that shows how consumer position various brands relative to each other on a graph whose

axes are formed by product attributes.

Perceptual organization: How people perceive the shapes, forms, figures, and lines in their visual world.

Personal influence: Refers to the idea that one individual may intentionally or unintentionally influence another in

his or her beliefs, attitudes, or intentions about something.

Personal marketing: The marketing of one's own self to others.

Personal value: The meanings of ideal end states and modes of conduct possessed by an individual.

Personality: The distinctive patterns of behavior, including thoughts and emotions, that characterize each

individual's adaptation to the situations of his or her life.

Persuasion: An explicit attempt to influence beliefs, attitudes and/or behaviors.

Physical Attractiveness: One of the key source characteristics that influence consumer reactions to

communications.

Physical Surroundings: The concrete physical and spatial aspects of the environment encompassing a consumer

activity.

Positioning: Influencing how consumers perceive a brand’s characteristics relative to those of competitive

offerings.

Positive Reinforecer: An appropriate reward that is given immediately after a behavior occurs to increase the

likelihood that the behavior will be repeated.

Preattention: The unconscious process in which consumers automatically scan the features of the environment.

Prepurchase search: Involves those information-seeking activities that consumers engage in to facilitate decision

making about a specific purchase after they have gone through the problem recognition stage.

Price elasticity: An economic concept that different groups of consumers react divergently to changes in the price

of a product or service.

Price-quality relationship: The greater the price, the less likely a consumer is to buy a particular product.

Primacy effect: It occurs when material early in the message has the most influence. (versus material at the end of

he message).

Private acceptance: A situation in which a person actually changes his or her beliefs in the direction of the group.

Proactive Interference: Material learned prior to the new material interferes with the learning of the new material.



Problem recognition: The discovery of discrepancy between an actual and a desired state of being.

Product development: The process which consists of developing, testing, naming, and packaging prototypes.

Product differentiation: The process of manipulating the marketing mix to position a brand so that consumers

perceive meaningful differences between it and its competitors.

Product disposition: What consumers do with a product once they have completed their use of it.

Product expectations: The standard against which the actual performance of the product is assessed.

Product innovation: A product that has been recently introduced and is perceived by consumers to be new in

relation to existing products and services.

Product quality: The customers’ overall evaluation of the excellence of the performance of a good or service.

Product use: It involves the actions and experiences that take place in the time period in which a consumer is

directly a good or service.

Psychographic Analysis: A type of consumer research that describes segments of consumers in terms of how they

live, work, and play.

Psychographics: The quantitative investigation of consumers’ lifestyles, personalities and demographic

characteristics.

Quiet Set: Retail stores that consumers enter, but have no intention of purchasing a product from.

Reactance: The motivational state of someone whose behavioral freedom has been threatened.

Reality principle: A principle that moves a person to be practical, and to function efficiently in the world.

Recognition task: Information is put in front of a consumer, who simply judges whether the information has been

previously seen.

Reference group: A group whose value, norms, attitudes or beliefs are used as a guide for behavior by an

individual.

Reflected Appraisal: A process in which a consumer examines the manner in which others in a reference group

interact with him or her.

Regional subcultures: Subcultures based upon a geographical sub-area of a larger culture.

Regulatory environment: It consists of al the laws and regulations established by federal, state, and local

governments to exert control over business practices.

Rehearsal: The silent repetition of information to encode into long-term memory.

Reinforcer: Anything that occurs after a behavior and changes the likelihood that the behavior will be repeated.

Relational exchange: A transaction that involves a long-term commitment in which trust and social relations play

an important role.



Reliability: It is evidenced when a scale is internally consistent, and gives similar results when an individual is

retested after a period of time.

Repeat purchase behavior: The consumer is merely buying a product repeatedly, without any particular product

for it.

Repetition effects: The impact on consumers of repeating an advertising message a number of times.

Repositioning: Changing how consumer perceive a brand’s characteristics relative of those of competitive

offerings.

Retrieval: The process in which an individual searches through long-term memory to identify within it the

information to be recalled.

Retrieval cues: Verbal or visual information, originally contained in an advertisement, that is placed on the product

or packaging to assist consumers' memories during decision making.

Retroactive interference: The concept that new material presented after old material has been learned interferes

with the recall of the old material.

Risk perception: The likelihood and degree of negativity which consumers perceive that outcomes may possess.

Role: The specific behaviors expected of a person in a position. Thus, when a person takes on a role, normative

pressures exert influence on the person to act in a particular way.

Role conflict: A case in which individuals simultaneously occupy two roles that may entail conflicting demands,

such as being both a mother and an executive.

Role overload: A state of conflict that occurs when the sheer volume of behavior demanded by the positions in a

person's position set exceeds available time and energy.

Roles: The specific behaviors expected of a person in a certain position.

Rumors: Information or stories in general circulation that lack factual certainty.

Salience effects: Occur when stimuli stand out from background information, so that attention is directed toward

those stimuli.

Salient beliefs: Important attribute-object beliefs activated when a person evaluates an attitudinal object.

Satisficing: The concept that consumers will frequently attempt to make only satisfactory decisions rather than

perfect decisions because of limitations in time, information-processing ability, or appropriate facts.

Schedule of reinforcement: A schedule, formed by the frequency and timing of reinforcers, that can dramatically

influence the pattern of operant responses.

Secondary reinforcer: A previously neutral stimulus that acquires reinforcing properties through its association

with a primary reinforcer.

Segmentation: The division of a marketplace into distinct subsets of consumers having similar needs and wants,

each of which can be reached with a different marketing mix.



Selective attention: The concept that consumers selectively decide to which stimuli they should attend.

Selective exposure: The concept that consumers actively choose whether or not to expose themselves to

information.

Self-concept: The totality of the individual's thoughts and feelings having reference to himself or herself as an

object.

Self-gifts: Gifts that are given by a person to himself or herself.

Self-perception: The concept that an individual may observe his or her own actions to infer attitudes and beliefs.

Semantic concepts: The meanings attached to words, events, objects, and symbols.

Semantic memory: How people store the meanings of verbal material in long-term memory.

Semiotics: The investigation of symbols and their meaning.

Sensation: The investigation of the ways in which people react to the raw sensory information they receive through

their sense organs.

Sensory memory: The extremely brief memories that result from the firing of nerve fibers in a person's brain.

Service quality: A customer's overall assessment of the excellence of a service.

Services: Products exchanged that are intangible and that someone does for someone else.

Shaping: A process through which a new operant behavior is created by reinforcing successive approximations of

the desired behavior.

Short-term memory: The site where information is temporarily stored while being processed. Short-term memory

is noted for its limited capacity.

Signs: The words, gestures, pictures, products, and logos used to communicate information from one person to

another.

Simple exchange: Characterized by two parties in a reciprocal relationship.

Situational involvement: Involvement that occurs over a short period of time and is associated with a specific

situation, such as a purchase.

Situational traits: Dispositions to act within general situational contexts.

Slippage: The marketing term for the percentage of customers who purchase a product but fail to redeem a premium

offer.

Social class: The relatively permanent and homogeneous strata in a society that tend to differ in their status, status,

occupations, education, possessions, and values.

Social class hierarchy: The ordering of the social classes from lower to higher.



Social comparison: The process through which people evaluate the correctness of their opinions, the extent of their

abilities, and the appropriateness of their possessions.

Social facilitation: The concept that a person become aroused when performing a task in front of other people. The

arousal tends to enhance performance on easy tasks and hinder performance on difficult tasks.

Social learning: The theory proposing that people will observe the actions of others to develop patterns of behavior.

Social-psychological personality theories: Personality theories that are based upon individual differences in how

people respond to social situations.

Social relations: The network of ties between individuals. Ties may be strong, weak, or nonexistent.

Social threats: External pressure by other people to induce a consumer to do something.

Socialization background factors: Factors that influence the socialization process, which include such variables as

the consumer's socioeconomic status, sex, age, social class, and religious background.

Source: An individual or character who is delivering a message.

Source characteristics: Features of the source, that impact the effectiveness of a message delivery, such as

credibility, physical attractiveness, likability and meaningfulness.

Source credibility: A construct used to describe sources of information. The extent that a source is perceived to

have expertise and trustworthiness.

Source expertise: The extent of knowledge the source is perceived to have about the subject on which he or she is

communicating

Source likability: The positive or negative feelings that consumers have toward a source of information.

Source physical attractiveness: The extent to which a source is perceived to have physical beauty.

Source trustworthiness: The extent that a source is perceived to provide information in an unbiased, honest

manner.

Specific positioning: The attempt to create strong connections between the product, certain key attributes, and the

product's benefits in consumers' minds.

Spontaneous brand switching: Consumers' tendency to periodically buy a new brand, even when nothing indicates

that they are unhappy with the brand previously used.

Standard rumors: When people seek explanations for unusual events.

Standard Industrial Classification system- A database that classifies and identifies groups of business firms that

product the same type of product.

Standard learning hierarchy: A high-involvement hierarchy of effects in which beliefs occur first, followed by the

development of feelings or affect, followed by the occurrence of a behavior.

Status: A person's social standing in the class hierarchy.



Status groups: Groups based upon social distinctions and differences in social prestige and respect.

Stimulus discrimination: Occurs when an organism behaves differently toward two similar stimuli.

Stimulus generalization: Occurs, when an organism reacts similarly to two or more distinct stimuli.

Store layout: The physical organization of a store that creates specific traffic patterns, assists in the presentation of

merchandise, and helps to create a particular atmosphere.

Subculture: A subdivision of national culture based on unifying characteristics, such as social status or religion,

whose members share similar patterns of behavior distinct from that of the national culture.

Subliminal perception: The concept that stimuli presented below the level of conscious awareness may influence

behavior and feelings.

Substitute activities: Activities that satisfy the same need for the consumer and are mutually exclusive (they cannot

take place together).

Substitution effect: The economic principle that, when the price of a product falls, it may be substituted for similar

goods that are now relatively more costly.

Superego: In psychoanalytic theory, the conscience or "voice within" a person that echoes the morals and values of

parents and society.

Symbolic innovation: An innovation that, through the acquisition of new, intangible attributes, communicates a

different social meaning than it did previously.

Symbols: Things that stand for or express something else.

Syncratic decision: Important decisions in which the husband and wife participate jointly.

Task definition: The reason or occasion for engaging in a consumer action, such as a gift occasion, a party, or even

a type of meal.

Tastes and preferences: Subjective inclinations that may change and act to shift the demand curve.

Technological innovation: A change in the characteristics of a product or service that results through the

introduction of a technological change.

Terminal values: Desired end states-how people would like to experience their lives.

Theory of reasoned action: A theory that describes the factors posited to influence the behavioral intentions of an

individual.

Time as a situational variable: The concept that the amount of time available to consumers forms a situational

context that acts to influence their acquisition, consumption, and disposition of products and services.

Time compression: The electronic process through which radio or television commercials may be compressed, such

that they last a shorter length of time.

Tolerance for ambiguity: A trait that assesses how a person will react to situations that have varying degrees of

ambiguity or inconsistency.



Total quality management (TQM): A management philosophy based on the idea that successful companies should

continuously improve the quality of their products and that quality is defined by the customer.

Trait: Any characteristic on which a person may differ from another in a relatively permanent and consistent way.

Trickle-down theory: A model of mass communications that holds that information moves from the upper classes

to the lower classes. For example, fashion trends begin with the wealthy.

Truth effect: If something is repeated often enough, people who are in a low-involvement processing mode will

believe it.

Two-factor theory: An explanation of advertising wear-out. In one process, the repetition of a message causes a

reduction in uncertainty and increased learning about the stimulus, resulting in a positive response. In the other

process, tedium or boredom begins to occur with each repetition.

Two-sided message: A message that presents both sides of an argument as a tactic to be more persuasive.

Two-step flow model: A model of mass communications that holds that mass communications first influence

opinion leaders, who in turn influence followers.

Types of risk: Various risk factors that may influence consumers including financial risk, performance risk,

physical risk, psychological risk, social risk, time risk, and opportunity loss risk.

Unawareness set: Consists of the unknown brands and products.

Unconditioned response: The reflexive, involuntary response elicited by an unconditioned stimulus.

Unique selling proposition: A quick, hard-hitting phrase that captures a major feature of a product or service.

Unit relation: As defined in balance theorv, a relationship that is attributed when an observer perceives that two

cognitive elements are somehow connected to each other.

Upper Americans: A description of a group of social classes including the upper-upper, lower-upper, and upper-

middle class.

Upper-lower class: A social class described as working, not on welfare, whose living standard is just above

poverty, whose behavior may be judged as crude and trashy, and that tends to consist of unskilled workers.

Upper-middle class: A social class composed of college graduates, managers, the intellectual elite, and

professionals.

Upper-upper class: The highest status group, marked by its small size and "old" money.

Usage situation: A type of situation based upon the task definition. It forms the context in which a product or

service is used and influences the product characteristics sought by a consumer. (p. 463)

Utilitarian needs: Desires of consumers to correct basic instrumental problems, such as filling a car's gas tank or

removing a spot from a rug.

VALS life-style classification scheme: A psychographic approach in which consumers are divided into four broad

groups of individuals-the need-driven, the inner-directed, the outer-directed, and the integrated groups.



VALS 2: A new psychographic model developed by SRI International that identifies relationships between

consumer attitudes and purchase behavior based upon three categories of self-identity orientations.

Values: Enduring beliefs about ideal end states and modes of conduct. They dictate what is good, right and

appropriate in behavior.

Variety-seeking purchases: Buying a new brand spontaneously, even though no dissatisfaction is expressed with

the previously purchased brand.

Vehicles: The specific means within a channel by which a message is communicated, such as Vogue magazine as a

vehicle within the print medium.

Vivid messages: Messages using vivid, concrete words, which to have a greater impact on receivers than messages

containing more abstract information.

Voluntary attention: A process in which the consumer actively searches out information to achieve some type of

goal.

Warner's index of social characteristics: Uses four variables as indicators of social class-occupation, source of

income, house type, and dwelling area.

Weber's law: The concept that as the intensity of a stimulus increases, the ability to detect a difference between two

levels of the stimulus decreases.

Word-of-mouth communications: Exchange of comments, thoughts or ideas between two or more consumers,

none of whom is a marketing source.

Word-of-mouth network: The relations between individuals through which personal influence may occur.

Working class: The social class composed of individuals who engage in blue-collar trades, such as carpentry,

plumbing, and assembly line work.

Working memory: (a common term for short-term memory) A hypothetical memory component in which

individuals actively process information.

Zapping: The process in which consumers avoid seeing commercials by switching channels on their television with

a remote control device.



Glossary of Consumer Behavior Terms

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