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The emergence of consumer research

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The Emergence of
Consumer Research
Harold H. Kassarjian and Ronald C. Goodstein
THE EMERGENCE OF
CONSUMER RESEARCH
If you would understand anything, observe its
beginning and its development.
Aristotle
‘Once upon a time a fledgling was born and given
the name Consumer Research – the bastard child
of marketing and an unknown father variously
alleged to be Economics, Psychology, Sociology,
Anthropology, Home Economics or occasionally
others as well. Despite these humble and ignoble
beginnings, the infant developed precociously and
was admired, housed, and nurtured by Mother
Marketing. It found it had occasionally kind uncles
named Business and Government, but the former
did not always appreciate the child’s talents
and the latter tended to favor more legitimate
nephews and nieces with names like Art, Science
and Medicine …. The child grew and learned. …’
Russell W. Belk (1986)
Indeed, a half a century has passed since
consumer behavior emerged primarily from
the field of marketing. And marketing, itself,
did not exist as an independent academic
endeavor until just a hundred years ago. At
the turn of the twentieth century, the area that
would become Marketing was embedded as
5339-Maclaran-Chap 04.indd 59
4
a small unit within the field of economics.
The earliest courses were titled Distributive
Industries or Distribution of Products
(Universities of Michigan, Illinois and
California in 1902, Pennsylvania in 1903 and
Ohio State in 1905). It took some three dec-
ades for marketing to come into its own in
the university setting in the United States
(Bartels, 1988) and another half century in
Europe (Jones and Monieson, 1990).
In those early days, marketing looked dif-
ferent and of course professors were trained
in economics rather than what we call modern
marketing today: marketing science, con-
sumer behavior and marketing strategy.
Academic research was rather impressionistic
and often consisted of narrative discussions
about the functions of say a wholesaler or
rack jobber. Buyer research involved the
study of markets, analysis of secondary data
and utility theory (see Wilkie and Moore,
2003 for an overview of marketing thought).
From this milieu, the foundations of modern
consumer behavior emerged. The purpose of
this chapter is to examine those foundations
and the emergence of consumer behavior
in the early years of development rather than
8/7/2009 5:51:33 PM
 60 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF MARKETING THEORY
to provide a review of the current state of
the field.
WORLD WAR II AND THE
POST-WAR DECADE
By the 1940s, two advances occurred that
were particularly relevant for the birth of
consumer behavior. One was the emergence
of Economic Psychology along with several
grand theories of human behavior – Freudian
Psychoanalytic Theory, Behavioral Learning
Theory and Lewinian Field Theory. The
other was research on the effects of the mass
media and the support of the US Government
in wartime research into the effects of propa-
ganda and persuasion on behavior and attitude
change (Stouffer et al., 1949).
ECONOMICS – A NEW VIEW
A significant challenge to prevailing eco-
nomic and marketing thought of that time
emerged from George Katona’s work on the
psychological analysis of economic behavior
(Katona, 1951). Katona was not a trained
economist but rather an outsider at the time.
He had received a law degree from the
University of Budapest and a PhD degree in
Psychology from Georg Müller’s laboratory in
Göttingen. He was working as an experimen-
tal psychologist in Berlin during the pre-World
War II period of hyperinflation. The pro-
found effects of inflation on the behavior of
consumers led him to undertake the study of
economics and explore Keynesian thinking
(Morgan, 1991).
The British economist, John Maynard
Keynes, had challenged the prevailing view
of economic behavior by emphasizing the
role played by government and the expecta-
tions of business. Katona felt that consumers’
expectations, attitudes and sentiments also
played an active role and that economists
ignored or made naïve assumptions about
human behavior. Consumer confidence had
5339-Maclaran-Chap 04.indd 60
to be taken into account to better understand
economic fluctuations.
Like so many other scholars at the time, his
work was interrupted by the rise of Nazism
and he ended up first in New York and then at
the University of Michigan. More of an exper-
imental psychologist than an armchair theo-
rist, he was trying to measure the effect that
consumer sentiment (optimism, pessimism
and confidence) had on economic activity. To
do his research and collect data, survey meth-
odology had to be developed. With Rensis
Likert, Donald Campbell and other well-
known social scientists he established the
Survey Research Center at the University of
Michigan (Newman, 1983). Today, consumer
confidence is considered an important indica-
tor in economic forecasting and survey research
permeates the worlds of marketing, politics and
most every other aspect of the social sciences.
The monthly index of consumer confidence,
The Michigan Survey Research Center and the
Journal of Economic Psychology stand as the
legacy of George Katona.
YALE COMMUNICATIONS STUDIES
AND EARLY RADIO RESEARCH
The second important advance in the emer-
gence of consumer behavior centered on
several communications research programs.
During the World War II era, The Yale
University Communications Research group
started studying the influences of the mass
media and in particular its influence on attitude
formation and change (e.g. Hovland et al.,
1953). ‘The Yale group “investigated charac-
teristics of the source of communication
(expertise, likeability), the message, (type of
appeal, one-sided versus two-sided arguments),
and audience characteristics such as sex differ-
ences, education, and personality traits such as
anxiety and self-esteem”’ (Edell, 1993: 197).
Sophisticated research was also appearing
in the business sector. The Young and Rubicam
advertising agency had hired George Gallup
to study the effects of advertising and later to
8/7/2009 5:51:33 PM
 THE EMERGENCE OF CONSUMER RESEARCH
develop the Gallup poll. Other agencies had
hired psychologists such as Daniel Starch to
better understand how advertising works and
how advertising impacts the consumer.
Still another psychologist, William Stanton,
was an important pioneer in radio research.
As a graduate student at Ohio State University,
he had developed a prototype of an audience
monitoring device, the forerunner of A.C.
Neilson’s radio and TV rating audiometers
(Maloney, 1987). Eventually, he became a top
executive at Columbia Broadcasting System
and instigated and abetted the wonderful
early audience studies and content analyses
of radio programs. Allport’s (1935) analyses
of soap operas, path breaking studies by
Merton (1946) on the Kate Smith War Bond
drives, the fascinating research on the effects
of the Orson Welles’ War of the Worlds radio
program (Cantril, 1940) and the wartime
studies on rumor (Allport and Postman, 1943)
are part of the legacy of CBS and Stanton.
Stanton, with the help of two social psy-
chologists at Princeton – Hadley Cantril and
Gordon Alport, was instrumental in bringing
to the United States the Austrian contingent.
It started with the eminent social scientist,
Paul Lazarsfeld, a mathematics PhD from the
University of Vienna, who had established a
radio research organization in Europe. At
Princeton, Lazarsfeld was little appreciated
by the administration and had to move his
new radio research organization several times
until he found a home for it at Columbia
University, later to become the Bureau of
Applied Social Research (Maloney, 1987).
Like Katona, Lazarsfeld was challenging
classical economics with his research by
showing that consumers are not rational cal-
culating machines but rather often groped in a
fog of half-knowledge and uncertainties. Years
before he had completed his classic study on
shoe buying in Zurich – with 900 respond-
ents, depth interviews and questionnaires – it
was a classic qualitative research project with
quantitative support on why the consumer
buys. There is more to shoe buying than price
and classical economics – attitudes, window
displays and personality, along with the
5339-Maclaran-Chap 04.indd 61
61
erotic effects of female sales people with
male customers and vice versa were critical
variables (Fullerton, 1990). [Another inter-
esting contribution to this thinking was
brought forth from Frank Baum, better known
for his Wizard of Oz books. He wrote a classic
book that examined how store windows
could be used to attract customers into dry
goods stores (Culver, 1988).]
In due course, Lazarsfeld brought to America
his students from the University of Vienna –
Ernest Dichter, Herta Herzog, Hans Zeisel and
other psychoanalytically oriented researchers
who changed the face of the field – America
(Maloney, 1987). Lazarsfeld and his people
were bringing back the techniques of intro-
spection as well as introducing qualitative
research and small samples to marketing and
advertising research (Kassarjian, 1994).
Before long, qualitative research had gained
a foothold in the research establishment.
Solid research was emerging from a number
of organizations, particularly the work of Sid
Levy and others at Social Research Inc. and
studies commissioned by Pierre Martineau at
the Chicago Tribune. Their approach was not
to measure the percent of consumers that had
an opinion about something or read an adver-
tisement, or preferred one brand over another,
but rather to explore motivations – why
people buy rather than what they buy (Levy,
1991). And, as it turned out, perhaps because
of the interest in motivation research, one of the
grand theories of human behavior was intro-
duced to the field of marketing and the infant
consumer behavior – Freudian Psychology.
By the end of World War II, elegant theories
of human behavior had become increasingly
popular in the humanities and social sciences
and their influence had started to seep into the
business sector.
MOTIVATION RESEARCH AND
FREUDIAN THEORY
The underpinning of psychoanalytic theory is
that human behavior is driven by psycho-sexual
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 62 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF MARKETING THEORY
forces with roots in childhood experiences.
The belief was that concepts such as id, ego
and super-ego along with childhood psycho-
social developmental stages drive most all
behavior from psychopathology to shop lift-
ing, from the selection of a spouse to the
purchase of a convertible automobile.
By 1957, Ernest Dichter, a major commer-
cial purveyor of qualitative research, ‘had
appointed himself the “Messiah of Motivation
Research” who had rescued the business
world from the pathetic ignorance that had
prevailed before his advent’ (Fullerton and
Stern, 1990: 209). He denounced all market-
ing research as superficial ‘nose-counting’.
As one might have expected, journalists and
the trade press publicized amusing interpre-
tations from Ernest Dichter’s reports – a
convertible car represents a mistress in which
one can take a ride once in a while, but when
it comes to permanent preference – the con-
sumer will choose the sedan. Teenagers use
soap to wash their hands to ward off sexual
guilt, and baking a cake is analogous to
delivering a child. The influence of Sigmund
Freud was unmistakable.
To many, Dichter appeared loud and arro-
gant and just too much for the research estab-
lishment to tolerate. The research factories at
the advertising agencies and pollsters such as
Gallup and Politz lashed back. Marketing
academics such as Wroe Alderson, the most
profound of American theorists, joined the
attack and sessions at professional meetings
such as at the American Marketing Association
(AMA) often became quite heated as the two
sides clashed swords (Fullerton and Stern,
1990). They claimed that Dichter ignored
basic social science research and that his find-
ings were neither valid nor reliable. William
(Bill) Wells (1956) wrote that some of Dichter’s
research reports read like a combination of
science fiction and Alice in Wonderland. In
the defence of Dichter, one client shot back,
‘I don’t care whether Dichter’s Chi Squares
are everything they should be. I get more
useful ideas in talking to Dichter for one day
than I ever get out of a hundred tables in a
survey report’ (Maloney, 1987: 36).
5339-Maclaran-Chap 04.indd 62
In time, the more inane aspects of the Dichter
type of Motivation Research presentations
faded away and the quality work of serious
researchers survived. Some even ended up as
classics to be reprinted again and again. Who
today has not read with fascination, Levy’s
(1959) ‘Symbols for Sale’, or heard of Mason
Haire’s (1950) classic study on Nestlé’s
Instant Coffee and accepted his interpretation
as reasonable.
FIELD THEORY
The second of the elegant theories from the
social sciences that impacted on consumer
behavior is Kurt Lewin’s Field Theory (e.g.
1936). Emerging out of the work of the
Gestalt psychologists in Berlin in the early
twentieth century, it would be rather difficult
to overestimate Lewin’s contribution to social
psychology and, through psychology, his
impact on consumer behavior. His influence
permeates the field ranging from studies on
group dynamics and sensitivity training, from
attitude change to cognitive organization and
from balance theories to food eating habits.
The basic characteristic of Lewin’s theory is
that behavior is a function of the life spade or
psychological field that exists at the time the
behavior occurs. The field is defined as the
totality of coexisting facts, including both
the person and his psychological environment,
all of which are mutually interdependent.
Every specific instance of behavior (say the
change of attitude about a brand of refrigera-
tor or the purchase of an automobile) must
be viewed as the result of the interaction of
variety of influences or vectors impinging
upon the person. Since all of these coexisting
forces are mutually interdependent, one
cannot study any one of them (say influence
of the salesman, advertising, personality,
social influence or price) independently and
expect to be able to reconstruct the act of pur-
chase. This is the familiar Gestalt dictum that
the whole is different from if not greater than
the sum of the isolated parts. Analysis must
8/7/2009 5:51:33 PM
 THE EMERGENCE OF CONSUMER RESEARCH
begin with the situation as a whole from
which the component parts can be differenti-
ated instead of beginning with a study of the
isolated elements (Kassarjian, 1973).
The Lewinian approach is ahistoric. Only
facts that exist in the present can directly
affect present events. Since consumer behav-
ior depends on the forces and influences
acting upon the individual at a given moment
in time, the moment the behavior itself
occurs, past events and future events that do
not exist now cannot affect behavior. Only
the directly relevant facts from previous
behavior that exert an influence on the present
are to be considered, rather than many of the
childhood experiences or sexual memories
used by adherents of Freud or the number of
previous trials used by learning theorists or
Markov analysts. Further, future events, aspi-
rations and expectations as they are relevant
and represented in the present are accounted
for by field theory, concepts difficult to deal
with in many of the other approaches to con-
sumer behavior (Kassarjian, 1968).
BEHAVIORAL LEARNING THEORIES
The final set of theories that created the infra-
structure of consumer behavior is that of
behaviorism. The basic view is that behavior
is a learned response pattern resulting from
experience, usually repeated exposures to a
stimulus. It started with John Watson, a psy-
chology professor at Johns Hopkins University
and an early regular consultant at J. Walter
Thompson Advertising Agency. Watson’s
contributions relied heavily on classical
conditioning and the work of Ivan Pavlov at
St. Petersburg in Czarist Russia. Pavlov’s
dog is well known to most everyone. When a
dog is presented with dry meat powder (the
unconditioned stimulus – UCS), he naturally
salivates (unconditioned response – UCR). If
the ringing of a bell (conditioned stimulus –
CS) is repeatedly associated with the presen-
tation of the UCS (food), the animal will also
salivate (conditioned response – CR). That is,
5339-Maclaran-Chap 04.indd 63
63
the dog will soon learn that the ringing of a
bell is associated with food (a reward) caus-
ing salivation when the UCS is not present.
This simple little model, with its subsequent
elaborations and sophistication such as the
role of rewards and punishment, the number
of trials needed, whether the original response
is trial and error or cognitively evaluated, etc.
form the basis of the variations of learning
theories as presented by Hull, Spence,
Skinner and so many others (Hilgard, 1956).
Not only were these theories crucial
for much of what was to come in main line
consumer research but the mathematical
off-shoots of learning theory (e.g. Estes,
et al., 1954 Bush and Mosteller, 1955) led
directly to the to the stochastic and linear
learning models of marketing that emerged
in the 1960s (e.g. Frank, 1962, Kuehn, 1962
and George Haines, 1969 book, Consumer
Behavior: Learning Models of Purchasing).
It was research on such topics as repetitive
purchases, brand loyalty, brand switching,
sales estimates and product adoption of that
era that were the precursors to Marketing
Science as it is defined today.
THE MILIEU OF THE 1960S
Problems cannot all be solved, for, as they are
solved, new aspects are continually revealed: the
historian opens the way, he does not close it.
Sir Maurice Powicke
During the 1960s and early 1970s, universities
were in a growth spurt, scientific knowledge
was exploding and the space program was
headed to the moon. President Kennedy had
introduced the Consumer Bill of Rights, and
the country was moving forward on all
fronts. The third consumerism wave was in
full force (the earlier waves were in 1900s
and 1930s). It was the thousand days of
Camelot. It seemed as if there was nothing
that could not be accomplished.
Marketing departments along with business
schools throughout the land, however, were
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 64 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF MARKETING THEORY
perceived to be in a dismal state. In an effort
to upgrade business schools, the Ford and
Carnegie Foundations had issued reports
encouraging the schools to incorporate the
behavioral sciences, mathematics, statistics
and social sciences into teaching, thinking and
research. The focus of the reports was reme-
dial in that business education was viewed as
a vast ‘wasteland of vocationalism … [that]
needed to be transformed into a science
based professionalism’ (Herbert Simon,
quoted in Tadajewski, 2006: 174). As Kernan
(1995) pointed out, the charge of these
reports to Business Schools was clear and
adamant: ‘Get Respectable!’
The Ford Foundation was willing to step in
with grants and financial backing. In less than
a decade, the Ford Foundation had invested in
excess of $45 million on business research
and educational reform (Tadajewski, 2006).
For example, Frank Bass, a traditional mar-
keting professor at the University of Illinois
was sent to Harvard to learn mathematics and
statistics. Perry Bliss was sent to Harvard to
learn psychology and sociology leading to
one of the very early readings books in con-
sumer behavior (Bliss, 1963). Joseph Newman
had support for his book on motivation
research (1957), as well as Philip Kotler for
his work on the use of computer simulation
for marketing strategy (1968) and Alan
Andreasen for his work on attitudes and inno-
vation diffusion (1965). John Howard was
granted a fellowship to write a monograph
(1963) that opened the door a bit wider for the
behavioral sciences. In time, that monograph
morphed into his marketing management
text and a bit later into Howard and Sheth’s
The Theory of Buyer Behavior (1969).
Step by step, thinking and ideas from
the scientific disciplines began to infiltrate
into marketing. Marketing departments here
and there began to recruit faculty trained
in subjects other than economics: psychol-
ogy, sociology, operations research, statis-
tics (Myers et al., 1980) and later even
geography and chemistry. New ideas and
approaches were being introduced – controlled
experiments, computer programming and
5339-Maclaran-Chap 04.indd 64
computer-based data analysis, mathematical
models, computer simulation, empiricism
and logical positivism – the era of data
analysis had arrived. The language of sci-
ence had reached from the positivists of the
Vienna Circle in the 1930s to marketing and
the new toddler – consumer behavior. The
face and intellectual interests of marketing
departments, throughout the land were to be
permanently changed (Kassarjian, 1994).
THEORIES OF CONSUMER
BEHAVIOR SURFACE
Perhaps the most recognized of the newly
emerging consumer behavior approaches
was one that had morphed from a learning
theory background - Howard–Sheth’s The
Theory of Buyer Behavior (1969). Howard
and Sheth incorporated aspects of the other
major theories of behavior, but it was basi-
cally based on learning theories prevalent
in psychology at the time – primarily Clark
Hull and Kenneth Spence’s work on stimulus–
response learning.
The Howard–Sheth theory
The Howard and Sheth model focused on the
element of repeat buying over time. Given a
drive (such as hunger) and the perception of
a cue (such as an advertisement), the indi-
vidual may make a response (purchase),
which if reinforced or rewarded, may lead to
learning (repeat purchase). Once the buyer is
motivated to buy a product class, he is faced
with a brand-choice decision. The elements
of his decision are (1) a set of motives, (2)
several courses of action and (3) decision
mediators, by which the motives are matched
with the alternatives. Over time, in the
face of repetitive brand choice decisions, the
consumer simplifies his decision process by
storing relevant information and establishing
a routine in his decision process (Kassarjian
and Robertson, 1968: 440). Howard and
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 THE EMERGENCE OF CONSUMER RESEARCH
Sheth is a fine example of the Utopian Grand
Theories Phase of consumer behavior devel-
opment (coined by Ekström, 2003), but there
were others.
The Engle, Kollat and
Blackwell model
Towards the latter part of the 1960s, several
attempts other than Howard–Sheth were
seeking an over-reaching model of consumer
behavior. Arguably, the most widely known
of the models at the time was that of Engel
et al. (1968). Used as an organizing basis for
the first comprehensive textbook in consumer
behavior, Engel and his colleagues developed
a massive flow chart depicting consumer
behavior from the molecular level of basic
needs and motives to the molar influences of
groups, societies and cultures via several
intervening variables. Much like the Howard
and Sheth model, this book was widely read
and discussed and the model researched
by aspiring new academics throughout the
land. The major contribution of this book,
however, was that the field now had a ‘real’
textbook from which consumer behavior
courses emerged.
The Nicosia model
Another model at the time, one using compu-
ter terminology, was presented by Francesco
(Franco) Nicosia (1966). Nicosia used a
simulation of the consumer decision process.
He took the case of a firm introducing a new
product and structured the resulting con-
sumer decision sequence. Nicosia believed
that consumer behavior could be diagrammed
in a flow chart as a decision sequence similar
to computer programs with feedback loops.
He then argued that simulation techniques
can be used to ‘explain in greater depth the
structure of a consumer decision process’ in
order to better predict consumer behavior.
The model was one more step toward an
encompassing theory of consumer behavior.
5339-Maclaran-Chap 04.indd 65
65
MIDDLE-RANGE THEORIES
AND THE 1970S
‘History, although sometimes made up of the few
acts of the great, is more often shaped by the
many acts of the small’.
Mark Yost
Before much time passed, the grand utopian
theories gave way to less complex middle-
range theories such as attitudes and informa-
tion processing (Cohen, 1972). For some
years, Tom Robertson had been calling for
the development of models on a less grandi-
ose level. He felt that the greatest promise
for advancing consumer behavior resided
in what Merton had called ‘middle-range’
theories. These are theoretical or conceptual
frameworks which do not constitute full-
blown theories that explain all behavior in a
grandiose fashion but neither are they merely
a set of isolated findings. They suggest
explanations and predictions concerning
some relatively circumscribed area of inquiry
(Ward and Robertson, 1973).
Numerous middle-range theories were
being promulgated. Earlier, in Columbia,
Lazarsfeld and Katz had stumbled on the
idea of the ‘Two Step Flow of Communication’
and the concept of the ‘gatekeeper’ – that
influence flows from mass media messages
to opinion leaders and from opinion leaders
to followers, rather than directly from the
mass media to the end user (Katz, 1957).
Work on the diffusion of innovation was soon
to follow (Robertson, 1971; Rogers, 1962).
Small group research, reference group theory,
attitudes, cognitive dissonance, risk percep-
tion, low involvement, attribution theory and
information processing among several other
middle-range theories were starting to pour
forth as researchers joined the cognitive
movement and empirically tested facets of
the various ‘mini-theories’. The cognitive era
had arrived in full force and the cognitive
consumer was reigning king in the land of
consumer research.
These researchers were biting off smaller
chunks of behavior to study. For example,
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 66 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF MARKETING THEORY
employing flow charts, Alan Andreasen
(1965) proposed a model of consumer
behavior built around attitudes. It too was a
decision sequence approach, heavily influ-
enced by Rogers work on diffusion, but
much more from a cognitive point of view.
Andreasen’s approach was one of the earliest
reflections of the cognitive revolution that
had arrived in consumer behavior.
Of the middle-range theories, no topic,
other than information processing captured a
greater interest than attitude formation and
change. The interest evolved out of the work
of Lazarsfeld and social psychologists of the
World War II era and later from the func-
tional theories of Katz evolving into the
expectancy-value approach of Rosenberg and
Fishbein (Lutz, 1991) and from these to the
highly sophisticated work of today. These
researchers had concluded that an attitude
(defined as a learned predisposition to
respond in a consistently favorable or unfa-
vorable manner with respect to a given
object) is the key link in the causal chain
between attribute perceptions on the one
hand and intentions and behaviors on the
other. The influence of Fishbein’s model (e.g.
Fishbein and Ajzen, 1975) is obviously seen
in the multi-attribute models of consumer
behavior studied today.
INFORMATION PROCESSING
AND CHOICE BEHAVIOR
The other large area of research during the
cognitive era and extending to the present
was that of information processing. A critical
book to emerge on cognitive theories of the
consumer was that of Flemming Hansen
(1972), Consumer Choice Behavior: A
Cognitive Theory. Drawing on research con-
ducted both in the United States and in
Europe, Hansen constructed a systematic
framework for the understanding of choice
behavior. The model, along with supporting
research, described how an individual
attempts to modify available alternatives or
5339-Maclaran-Chap 04.indd 66
choices so that an acceptable one emerges
depending on the amount of conflict that can
be tolerated. Appearing on the heels of Nicosia
and a bit before Bettman, this book was a
milestone in the work to follow on consumer
choice and information processing.
With the publication of Bettman’s book,
An Information Processing Theory of
Consumer Choice (1979) research on infor-
mation processing monopolized other topics
in the journals and conference proceedings.
That book may well have been one of the
most cited works at the time and managed to
tie together much of the available research in
information processing. The central focus is
on viewing consumers as cognitively active
problem solvers and understanding the strat-
egies and plans used in decision making,
Research has revolved around information
search, information acquisition, encoding,
storage, retrieval, integration and the proc-
esses used in the choice of heuristics, that is,
the rules of thumb a consumer might use.
The theory emphasized the role of memory
and allowed for flexible processing heuristics
and choice mechanisms to a greater extent
than previous theories. It explicitly included
the construct of processing capacity and dis-
cussed specific processing limitations and
heuristics in detail.
To sum up this entire line of research, in
the words of Shimp (1991: 163), the cogni-
tive orientation views consumer behavior as
an ‘active process whereby the individual
forms hypotheses about consumption alter-
natives, acquires and encodes information,
and integrates the new information with pre-
existing beliefs’. This work has had an
extremely long period of influence in the
field and most certainly has carried through
to the present.
EMERGENCE OF THE PROFESSION
The dissemination of scientific findings and
intellectual intercourse among the disparate
members of the consumer behavior fraternity
8/7/2009 5:51:33 PM
 THE EMERGENCE OF CONSUMER RESEARCH
was a problem at first. Consumer Research
was not a topic particularly endearing to
social science journals and much of the work
did not have an obvious and direct relevance
to marketing professionals and marketing
journals. To its chagrin, the newly launched
Journal of Marketing Research was being
overwhelmed with papers devoted to con-
sumer research. At other times, researchers
presented their work at meetings such as the
American Marketing Association, American
Association for Public Opinion Research,
American Psychological Association and at
university-sponsored seminars that led to
proceedings type edited books (e.g. Newman,
1957; Sommers and Kernan, 1967).
The time was ripe for a professional asso-
ciation and a journal of our own through which
researchers could discuss and disseminate
their ideas and their work. In 1969, at Ohio
State University, a group of individuals met
to form what was to become the Association
for Consumer Research (ACR). In the fol-
lowing year, the first ACR conference was
held on the campus of the University of
Massachusetts with about one hundred indi-
viduals attending from academia, the mass
media, business, consumer organizations and
the federal government. That small group
has grown such that the North American
ACR conference now registers in excess of
1,000 attendees, requiring some 800 plus
hotel rooms. In addition, ACR conferences
are also held in Europe, Latin America and
Asia-Pacific. The birth of the ACR is well
documented in numerous publications and
need not be repeated here (For example, see
the informative papers by Cohen, Engel,
Kassarjian, Kernan and Wells in the 1995
ACR proceedings, Advances in Consumer
Research).
Actually, a few years before the emergence
of ACR, psychologists working in industry
and advertising agencies, along with academ-
ics with similar interests, had formed Division
23, the Division of Consumer Psychology,
out of the Industrial Psychology arm of
the American Psychological Association. A
couple of decades later, Division 23 morphed
5339-Maclaran-Chap 04.indd 67
67
into the Society for Consumer Psychology
(SCP) – an organization, primarily of psy-
chologists that specialize in consumer research
but which also attracted hundreds of members
from marketing departments and business
schools. Much like ACR and often with over-
lapping membership, it has grown rapidly in
the following decades. The prestigious
Journal of Consumer Psychology, edited
and owned by SCP, is a major publisher of
consumer research since its emergence two
decades ago (Schumann et al., 2008).
The premier journal, however, continues
to be the Journal of Consumer Research
(JCR). Its history more or less parallels that of
ACR. From the very beginning of Consumer
Research as a scientific field of endeavor,
it was obvious that a major journal was
needed and essential. In October 1973, repre-
sentatives from ten scholarly associations
(Association for Consumer Research,
American Marketing Association, American
Psychological Association, American
Statistical Association, American Sociolo-
gical Association and five others) met in
Chicago and the new journal was born. In the
ensuing months, under the sensitive guidance
of Robert Ferber, a policy board was estab-
lished, a founding editor, Ron Frank from
Wharton, appointed and editorial offices
established $50,000 was borrowed from the
American Marketing Association, repaid
within a year, as subscriptions as well as
manuscripts flowed in. The first accepted
ones were from authors such as George
Katona, George Day and Jim Bettman and by
Spring 1974, the first issue was mailed to
some 7,000 subscribers. Subscriptions came
from academics in marketing, psychology,
home economics, etc. Also, advertising
agencies, corporations, law firms, television
networks and governmental agencies were
subscribers to a new journal that was about
the consumer. Unfortunately, the journal
could not be everything for everyone, reader-
ship dropped and over the next ten years the
journal became what it is today, appealing
primarily to academic researchers in the
field of consumer behavior. As with ACR, the
8/7/2009 5:51:33 PM
 68 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF MARKETING THEORY
emergence of the journal has been well docu-
mented and need not be repeated here. (See,
for example, papers by Ronald Frank and
Jerome Kernan in the 1995 Association for
Consumer Research Proceedings and the
Tenth Anniversary Editorial in the March
1984 issue of JCR.)
CONSUMERISM AND PUBLIC
POLICY RESEARCH
Meanwhile, in the land of academe, the
decade of the 1970s brought serious prob-
lems. The country found itself in another
war, this one with civilian resistance and
unrest. Campuses occasionally looked like a
war zone with tear gas, helmeted police and
military troops. Enrollment in business
school classes dropped precipitously and
many business school professors vainly tried
to distance themselves from the establish-
ment, the war, and the ‘powers that be’.
Marketing was being perceived as the hand-
maiden of the military–industrial complex
and, perhaps in self-defence, many market-
ing professors were promulgating that
marketing could be used not only to sell
orange juice and tanks but also charities,
universities, social causes and hospitals
(Kassarjian, 1994). It could be used for the
good of society as well as the evils of trade.
Kotler and Levy (1969) helped by coining
new words: political marketing, social
marketing, broadened marketing and even
demarketing. The political climate of
Kennedy and Johnson was very supportive of
buyer oriented rather than seller oriented
research (see Andreasen, 2006 for a nice
historical review) and the stage was set for
developing social marketing, ‘an area that
would focus on the work of not-for-profit
groups and government agencies concerned
with effective interventions into social problem
areas’ (Wilkie and Moore, 2003: 130).
Concerned with consumerist’s criticism of
marketing practices, a substantial amount of
research effort was devoted to investigating
5339-Maclaran-Chap 04.indd 68
such issues as deceptive advertising, counter
and corrective advertising, product informa-
tion, marketplace treatment of disadvantaged
and minority consumers and consumer satis-
faction, dissatisfaction and complaining
behavior (Sheth and Gross, 1988). The latter,
consumer satisfaction/dissatisfaction eventu-
ally developed as a subarea (Hunt, 1977).
Governmental organizations such as the
Federal Trade Commission, the Food and
Drug Administration, the White House and
the Post Office, along with state attorneys
general and district attorneys, had become
aware that consumer research could indeed
have applications in their spheres of concern.
However, the major impact was at the Federal
Trade Commission (FTC). ‘Beginning in
1971 marketing academics took leave for
about a year and moved into the FTC as “in-
house consultants”’. During the next ten
years, some 30 marketing faculty worked in
this capacity and contributed significantly
to the development of research in the public
policy sphere. By the end of the decade,
the FTC was spending $1 million per year
on marketing research (Wilkie and Moore,
2003). Studies on selling and advertising
claims, labeling, product safety, as well as
work related to case selection, analysis of
evidence, and the development of Trade
Regulation Rules poured forth. Consumer
research had come into its own as a recog-
nized field of inquiry, not only in industry
and academia, but now also in governmental
agencies as well as in court rooms. Consumer
research, indeed, could be applied to the pro-
tection of consumers as well as exploitation.
THE SIMPLER CONSUMER
AT THE CENTURY END
Writing history is a perpetual exercise in judgement.
Cushing Strout
As the decade of the 1980s arrived, con-
sumer researchers, for the most part, retreated
from the halls of government back to their
8/7/2009 5:51:33 PM
 THE EMERGENCE OF CONSUMER RESEARCH
ivied halls. By this time the deep-seated
belief in the cognitive man, the thinking,
reasoning, problem solving, consumer was
being challenged. Of course, in many cases
and under many conditions, the consumer
appears to behave as a thinking, reasoning,
information processing individual, but under
other conditions, particularly low involve-
ment products, he simply could not care less.
Olshavsky and Granbois (1979) had pro-
duced data that many purchases do not
involve decision making at all. In fact, most
purchases require minimal, if any, cognitive
activity. Plodding, mindlessness and the
‘muddling through’ consumer were being
recognized as a descriptor of much con-
sumer activity. The concept of involvement
and its measurement had important implica-
tions (Zaichkowsky, 1985). For example, the
assumption that attitudes precede action
implies a classical high involvement hierar-
chy (Petty et al., 1981). Under low involve-
ment conditions the hierarchy of effects is
not awareness-attitude-adoption, but rather
awareness and minimal comprehension
occur first, followed by trial and attitude
formation or attitude change in that order
(Ray, 1974). Other challengers were promul-
gating simpler paradigms such as classical
conditioning and trial and error learning
theories (Nord and Peter 1980, Shimp, 1991).
It appeared that Watson, Skinner, Hull and
Pavlov were being reincarnated.
The long ignored concept of motivation
was also making a comeback. Words such as
mood, emotions and affect arousal were
beginning to reappear along with exploration
into the affective and emotional side of con-
sumer experience.
In Europe, Kroeber-Riel (1979) was claim-
ing that verbal methods of measuring arousal
or cognitive activity such as information
processing, affect, mood and emotions are
either not sensitive enough or involve a need-
less detour (the measurement of the percep-
tion of response) when the response itself can
be measured directly. Kroeber-Riel claimed
that physiological measures of response are
superior approaches.
5339-Maclaran-Chap 04.indd 69
69
PHYSIOLOGICAL APPROACH TO
CONSUMER BEHAVIOR
Over the years, physiological measures have
been used to register emotions, interest,
motivations and other responses. Studies use
eye movement, pupil dilation, voice pitch
analysis as well as galvanic skin response and
measurements such as heart rate, respiration
and other autonomic nervous system reac-
tions have been promulgated unfortunately
with little success or strong experimental
support.
Starting in the 1980s, brain lateralization
research was appearing in the literature. The
basic research involved studies using the
electroencephalograph (EEG) on individuals
with brain damage, patients emerging from
electroconvulsive therapy and by controlled
stimulation of the brain hemispheres (Hansen,
1981). These data indicated that among
normal individuals, the left hemisphere is
primarily responsible for cognitive activities,
symbolic representations and sequential
analysis. The left brain is causal, logical and
argumentative, in contrast to the right brain,
which is more diffuse, spatial, intuitive, artis-
tic and musical. Researchers next turned to
measurement of brain activity – positron
emissions tomography (PET scanning) and
functional magnetic resonance image (fMRI)
scanning (Hansen and Christensen, 2007).
With these brain-scanning techniques, exactly
where in the brain activity occurs is being
measured (e.g. talking, feeling fear, solving
problems, etc.). The work is surely interesting
although its level of successful contribution
to our knowledge of consumer behavior is
yet to be established.
THE QUALITATIVE MOVEMENT
The most wide spread challenge to the cogni-
tive approach and laboratory research
appeared by the late 1980s under the terms
postmodernism, post positivism, humanism
and more recently ‘Consumer Culture Theory’
8/7/2009 5:51:33 PM
 70 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF MARKETING THEORY
(coined by Arnould and Thompson, 2005).
Marching in step with postmodern American
sociology, anthropology, literary criticism
and other scholarly areas as well as postmod-
ern brethren in Western Europe, qualitative
research again emerged but with a new
twist.
The prologue or preamble of the postmod-
ern work in the US was the consumer behavior
odyssey project (Belk, 1991; Belk et al.,
1989). A group of consumer researchers trav-
elled across the country interviewing consum-
ers along the way, in little towns, at county
fairs and along the road, taking voluminous
notes and video recording of consumers
behaving in natural settings and real life.
Since then the method has expanded to
hundreds of researchers interviewing and
taping individuals in a variety of purchase,
consumption and disposal situations. These
are not controlled experiments in a labora-
tory with representative samples, or looking
at brain activity measures in wired consum-
ers, but real people in the real world in an
uncontrolled situation. The data collected in
the field is then analyzed, organized and pre-
sented in the attempt to better understand
what it is that consumers really do and think.
To the traditional research establishment, this
work was perceived as an attack on the scien-
tific method. It was the puttering of a foolish
group of researchers. Of course, many of the
postmodern researchers made similar accu-
sations about positivistic research. They feel
that controlled laboratory experimentation
with subjects placed in unreal situations
simply do not represent how consumers
really behave (cf. Wells, 1993).
The point is that there are many ways to
make contributions to knowledge whether
those methods are standard practice or not.
Much as Katona challenged traditional eco-
nomics and introduced survey research, much
as the ilk of Dichter rattled the foundations of
marketing research, and the cognitive
researchers rattled the establishment in the
1960s, so too the postmodern movement has
rattled those who work in highly controlled
laboratory research or rely on the sometimes
5339-Maclaran-Chap 04.indd 70
unreal assumptions of mathematical mode-
ling. Interestingly, postmodern sociologists,
anthropologists and others are now examining
consumers as their point of reference.
THE DAWNING OF A NEW CENTURY:
BACK TO THE FUTURE
History, by appraising...[the students] of the past,
will enable them to judge of the future.
Thomas Jefferson
As the 1990s arrived, and blended in with the
new century, consumer researchers have set
their sights on both content and methods
once again. While traditional fields such as
attitudes, personality, motivation and emo-
tions continued to exist, topics reasonably
new to the field have emerged (e.g. behavio-
ral decision theory (BDT) and judgment and
decision making (JMD)). Much of the con-
tent in the field today, aside from the con-
sumer culture theory work, seems to be
towards the BDT side. The applications of
BDT researchers turned from brand-based
inquiries to people based issues such as
greater emphasis on issues related to personal
health and well-being.
New methods of inquiry and data presen-
tation have emerged – not only computer
imaging such as brain scans, but also from
the postmodern realm the presentation of
research findings in DVD and streaming
video formats. The medium of film has been
used as an expression of consumer issues and
even poetry has been used as a metaphor for
consumer behavior.
With the onset of the 2000s, research in
the entire field of consumer behavior simply
exploded in size. From a handful of maverick
researchers, the number of scholars grew to
tens of hundreds. Much as behavioral articles
overwhelmed the Journal of Marketing
Research a few decades earlier, the Journal
of Consumer Research and the Journal of
Consumer Psychology were overwhelmed and
by the turn of the century, well over a dozen
8/7/2009 5:51:33 PM
 THE EMERGENCE OF CONSUMER RESEARCH
new journals had emerged, publishing the
work of hundreds of researchers in dozens of
countries. However, as mentioned earlier, our
purpose in writing this chapter was not to
present the field as it exists today – that we
leave to others – but rather to chronicle the
development of a scholarly field of endeavor.
We hope we have presented an overview of
that development that does justice to an
exciting field of inquiry that is every bit as
important as the fields from which it
emerged.
To look back upon history is inevitably to distort it.
Norman Pearson
NOTES
The authors would like to thank the editors, reviewers
and our colleagues who helped in the preparation of
this chapter. We particularly thank Alan Andreasen,
Gary Bamossy, Debra R. Kassarjian and Claudia
Townsend. Some of the comments in this chapter
were presented at the Research Traditions in
Marketing Conference during the twentieth anniver-
sary of EIASM in Brussels and at the 2005 Conference
on Historical Analysis and Research in Marketing in
Long Beach, California.
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