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ELEMENTS OF BEHAVIORAL AUDIT, GLOSSARY OF TERMS, &

REPRESENTATIVE READINGS

The idea behind the “behavioural audit” is to ask a very simple question of any proposed
marketing action: are any of the factors listed below, or changes to them, likely to adversely
affect (a) the consumer decision making journey, or (b) any component of Fishbein’s
multiattribute model (i.e., attribute weights, brand ratings, or both)?

Marketing Mix Influences

 Product: This refers to any changes in the features of the product (e.g., attributes, packaging,
brand name, after-sales-service, warranties, etc.).
 Price: This refers to any increase or decrease in price (or price perceptions).
 Promotion: This refers to any changes in how a product or service is promoted, including
both the communication component of promotions (i.e., advertising) and the incentives
component of promotions (i.e., rebates, discounts).
 Place/Distribution: This refers to any changes in how the product was distributed (e.g., retail
channel, distribution networks, salespersons).

Situational Influences
 Purchase Task: What is the purchase occasion? Issues to consider: for oneself vs. for others
(i.e., a gift), for consumption vs. for resale, etc.
 Social Surroundings: Is the consumption occurring in private or public settings? If in public
settings then what are the social surroundings like (i.e., the number of other people, the type
of other people)? It is important to take into account the “perceived” social context because
many of these effects can occur even when people may not be physically present.
o Reading: Cialdini and Goldstein (2004) (see course website)
 Physical Surroundings: What are the features of the physical environment in which the
decision is taking place? Components of the physical environment that are especially relevant
to consumption include aspects of the store environment like music, ambient smells, color,
ceiling height, flooring, etc. Note that the key mediating variable in many of these variables
related to physical surroundings is time. In other words, rarely do certain types of music or
smells directly lead to an increases in purchases/expenditures: it is only when that particular
type of music or smell induces consumers to spend more time in the store, that we actually see
increases in purchases and expenditures.
o Reading: Paco Underhill (Book: Why We Buy)
o Reading: Music, HBR Article (see course website)
o Reading: Smells, Psychological Science Article (see course website)
o Reading: Ceiling Height (see articles on Juliet Zhu’s website at UBC/CKGSB)
o Reading: Color (Mehta and Zhu; articles on Juliet Zhu’s website at UBC/CKGSB)
o Reading: Flooring (Zhu; articles on Juliet Zhu’s website at UBC/CKGSB)
 Temporal Effects: This refers to (a) the time involved in making the purchase (greater time
usually indicates greater involvement and careful examination of the information at hand),
and (b) the time of day when the purchase is being made (this relates to biorhythms that
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people experience throughout the day, which affects their energy levels and consequently, the
manner in which they search for and process information, as well as the variety-seeking they
engage in).
o Reading: Paco Underhill (Book: Why We Buy)
o Reading: Marketing Letters article (see course website)
 Antecedent States: The affect that people bring into the purchase situation (i.e., good mood,
bad mood, positive affect).

Sociocultural Influences
 Personal Influence: One’s network of friends with varying degrees of strengths of
connection. The literature here usually looks at “strong ties” and “weak ties” between a
person and the person’s connections.
o Reading: MSI (Marketing Science Institute) Relevant Knowledge Series: Social
Networks and Marketing (by Van den Bulte and Wuyts)
 Reference Groups: Groups of people whose attitudes, behaviors, beliefs, opinions,
preferences, and values are used by an individual as the basis for his or her judgment.
Reference groups may be associative (i.e., ones that an individual is associated with),
dissociative (i.e., ones that an individual would not like to be associated with), and
aspirational (i.e., ones that an individual aspires to be associated with).
 Family: Individual vs. group decision making (attribute weights tend to shift a lot between
individual and group decision making); socialization (how does a person first come to
develop preferences about and within a product category? How does one get “socialized” to
have product and brand preferences?), and life cycle (preferences shift fairly dramatically as
one transitions through major phases of one’s life cycle, like childhood, high school, college,
single adulthood, marriage, marriage with children, empty nesters, etc.; preference shifts and
openness to change are especially high at the transition points between major phases).
 Social Class: Class is a multivariate construct comprising income, education, and some other
variables which depend on country/culture being examined.
o Reading: New York Times Article on Class in the US (see course website)
 Culture: The national culture that the consumer belongs to. Some of the most popular
frameworks (based on fundamental research) for looking at such cross-cultural differences
are: (a) Hofstede’s 5 Dimensions (individualism vs. collectivism, uncertainty avoidance,
power distance, masculinity vs. femininity, and Confucianism/Long-term orientation), (b)
Hal’s High vs. Low Context Cultures, and (c) Kitayama and Markus’s Independent vs.
Interdependent Cultures.
 Subculture: The sub-cultures within a country (or culture); often operationalized as ethnicity
marketing (e.g., “micro marketing” towards Caucasians, African-Americans, Hispanics,
Asians, etc., audiences).

Psychological Influences
 Motivation: What are the fundamental motivations that drive people towards consuming (or
keep them away from) a product or a service? There are many lenses through motivations
can be looked at:
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o Reading: Review Article on Motivation (by Bargh, Gollwitzer, & Oettingen; see
course website)
o Reading: There are 3 motivational accounts which are becoming extremely popular in
explaining a whole host of behaviors; these “three big theories” are about the
different mindsets people adopt when they’re moving towards a goal. The attribute
weights shift a lot (albeit predictably) depending on which mindset consumers adopt.
These three big theories are:
 Reading: CLT (Construal Level Theory); see article by Trope (on course
website). This is about whether a consumer assumes a “distal” mindset (e.g.,
abstract) or a “proximal” mindset (e.g., concrete) when engaging with and
pursuing a goal.
 Reading: Regulatory Focus; see article by Higgins (on course website). This is
about whether one is “promotion” oriented (i.e., one is oriented towards
actively obtaining positive outcomes) or whether one is “prevention”
oriented (i.e., one is oriented towards avoiding bad outcomes) in engaging
with and pursuing a goal.
 Reading: Deliberative vs. Implemental mindsets; see article by Gollwitzer et
al. (on course website). This about how all actions go through phases, and
two distinct phases are the deliberative phase/mindset (i.e., when you’re still
evaluating the big picture, “why” and “what” of the task/goal) and the
implemental phase/mindset (i.e., when you’re looking at the implementation
or “how” of the task/goal).
 Personality: The consumer’s personality traits. By far one of the most prevalent ways of
classifying personality is the Big-Five Scale and its 5 dimensions of personality (Extraversion,
Agreeableness, Conscientiousness, Emotional Stability, and Openness to Experiences),
which are able to predict a whole host of behaviors from product preferences to sales person
performance. It could also serve as an important segmentation variable. Some important
articles/resources in this area are:
o Reading: Big-Five Scale; see article by Paunonen (on course website); this is the
original 30-item scale
o Reading: TIPI (Ten-Item Personality Inventory); see URL (on course website);
recently a short (and therefore much more easy to administer) 10-item version of the
scale has become very popular.
o Reading: If you’re interested in the relationship between TIPI and sales person
performance please take a look at the article by Wharton’s Adam Grant (“Rethinking
the extraverted sales ideal: The ambivert advantage,” Psychological Science, 24 (6),
1024 – 1030).
o Reading: A review article on personality (by Funder) also talks about other ways of
measuring personality besides the Big-Five (see course website).
 Perception: Not everything we perceive is actually registered or retained in memory. This
area is about acknowledging that most stimuli go through a series of perceptual filters before
they can influence us. Are the marketing stimuli strong enough to actually penetrate all these
filters and make a meaningful impact on consumer behavior?
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 Learning: This is about how we learn about brand loyalty, attribute preferences, category
preferences, etc., over our lifetime starting from our earliest “imprinting” childhood
moments to influences in our adulthood.
 Values, beliefs, and attitudes: Values, beliefs, and attitudes refer to opinions and stances that
people take towards some stable facets of our lives and involves measuring people’s opinion
regarding risk-taking, uncertainty, variety seeking, hard work, education, politics,
conservatism vs. liberalism, currently controversial issues like gay marriage, the role of
government in society (e.g., attitude towards increase in taxation), etc. The most popular
tools used in this area are the VALS (Values Attitudes and Lifestyle Survey), Claritas’s
PRIZM tool, and Acxiom Corp’s Lifestages product.
 Lifestyle: This refers to lifestyle choices that people make and include questions related to
recreational activities (e.g., soccer, snowboarding, jogging, etc.), vacation choices, reading
habits, etc. (even pet choices!). Essentially any lifestyle variable could be included here.