Consumer Psychology

Define what is Consumer Psychology ?

Consumer psychology is nothing but a branch of social psychology that examines the customer preference, habit, tendency and their impact on products offered in the market. Consumer psychology helps the company for the formulation of new products and in the design of their advertisements by manufacturers. They are simply called as the study of the consumer behavior. The consumer behaviors are studied as an attempt to understand about the decision making process of the consumers in groups or individuals.

This study is purely based on the consumer buying behavior. According to this study, the consumers are differentiated in three roles as user, payer and buyer. Even experts in this field find difficult to predict the consumer behavior. The study of the consumer behavior is the sub specialty of the industrial organizational psychology. The consumer psychologists study about the various topics like :-

• What insists the consumers to choose the businesses, products or services?
• Is there any emotional process behind the consumer decisions?
• Why people choose the specific brand without considering the other brands?
• What is the motivation behind their decision?
• Is there any influence from the society like friends, family and relatives for their decision?
• Why each individual’s decision differs in buying the products?
• What type of advertisements draw the attention of the people?

What is the work of the consumer psychologist?

Before starting any business they must understand about the consumer preferences because the main target of any business is the consumers. The consumer psychologists spend much time in knowing about the thoughts of the consumers and find the ways to draw the attention of the consumers. They consider all the things like the consumer’s gender, age, status of the consumers and their personal annual income etc. They also consider researching the type of products and other things that influence the buyers.

Some consumer psychologists focus on the social marketing by finding the group preferences. Research will be conducted to know about them, the research mostly involves knowing consumer thought about the new product or about the acceptance of the consumers if changes done on the product. This helps the manufacturers in designing the product according to their customers’ needs.

Usually the consumer psychologists conduct research by using the methods such as surveys like phone surveys or online surveys, experiments, questionnaires, personal contact, direct observation methods.

The online surveys are conducted by sending the survey information directly to their mail. Clicking the hyperlink in the mail will connect the people to the particular survey. The survey often involves the questions related to the product change or about the brands or any other such things and they also ask the past shopping experience and the factors that influence them to buy the product.

In the research they collect information like the participant’s age, sex, race, educational qualification, current financial status. Since these are very personal information, they are kept confident and only used for research purposes. They also begin surveys only if they qualify the criteria to attend the survey.