Consumer Behavior

1. Abstract information: Pallid information, lacking concreteness and communication

effectiveness.
2. Absolute threshold: The lowest level at which a stimulus can be detected 50% of the time.
3. Acceptable risk: The level of risk that a consumer will tolerate when purchasing a product or
service.
4. Acculturation: The difficult task of learning a new culture.
5. Achievement motivation: The motivation identified by David McClelland to strive for success
and to perform up to one's capabilities.
6. Adaptation: A process in which an organism has repeated experience with a stimulus and
habituates to it.
7. Adaptation level: The level of intensity of a stimulus to which a consumer has become
accustomed or adapted
8. Advertising clutter: Too many ads on TV or radio impeding the ability of consumers to
remember the ads.
9. Advertising wear-out: Occurs when consumers are overexposed to an advertisement, resulting
in decreased positivity.
10. AIO statements: Used in psychographic inventories to obtain information on consumers'
activities, interests, and opinions.
11. Altruistic Marketing: A field of study that (1) researches the causes of negligent consumer
behavior and (2) applies the findings to develop treatment and/or preventive methods to reduce
the maladaptive actions of consumers.
12. Alternative evaluation: The formation of benefits and attitudes regarding choice alternatives.
13. Applied behavior analysis: A process in which environmental variables are manipulated to alter
behavior.
14. Articulation: A component of consumer knowledge that describes how finely a person can
discriminate differences along a dimension.
15. 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.
16. Attention: The allocation of cognitive capacity to an object or task, so that information is
consciously processed.
17. Attitude: The amount of affect or feeling for or against a stimulus.
18. Attributes: The characteristics or features that an object may or may not have.

19. Attribution theory: Identifies the various means through which people determine the causes of
action of themselves, others, and objects.
20. Awareness set: A subset of the total universe of potential brands and products available of
which a consumer is aware.
21. 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.
22. 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.
23. Beliefs: The cognitive knowledge people have of the relations among attributes, benefits, and
objects.
24. Central cues: Those ideas and supporting data that bear directly on the quality of the arguments
developed in the message.
25. 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.
26. Channels: The media through which information flows.
27. Childhood consumer socialization: Processes by which young people acquire skills, knowledge,
and attitudes relevant to their functioning as consumers in the marketplace.
28. Choice: The process in which consumers make a choice between two or more alternative
courses of action.
29. Choice uncertainty: The degree of uncertainty about which of several brands to select.
30. 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.
31. Closure: A principle of perceptual organization that describes the tendency of people to fill in
missing information to create a holistic
32. Cluster analysis: The use of demographic variables to identify where groups of neighborhoods
with households of similar consumers arc located geographically.
33. Clutter: An overabundance of advertisements that decreases communications effectiveness.
34. Cognitive complexity: A personality characteristic that describes the degree of structural
intricacy of the organizing schemas used by different groups of consumers to code and store
information in memory.
35. Cognitive consistency: The tendency of people to maintain a logical and consistent set of
interconnected attitudes.

36. Cognitive dissonance: An unpleasant emotional state that is felt when there is a logical
inconsistency among cognitive elements.
37. Cognitive learning: The process through which people form associations among concepts, learn
sequences of concepts, solve problems and gain insights.
38. Cognitive responses: The thoughts that consumers may develop in response to messages.
39. Cognitive personality theories: Personality theories positing that individual differences result
from variations in how people process information, think, and learn.
40. Consumer behaviors: consist of all the actions taken by consumers related to acquiring,
disposing, and using products and services.
41. Consumer beliefs: The cognitive knowledge people have of the relations among attributes,
benefits, and objects.
42. Consumer complaint behavior: A multiple set of actions triggered by perceived dissatisfaction
with a purchase episode.
43. 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.
44. Consumer environment: It is composed of factors existing independently of individual
consumers and firms that influence the exchange process.
45. Consumer ethnocentrism: A scale measuring the tendency of consumers to prefer to purchase
U.S.-made products.
46. Consumer expectations: A person's prior beliefs about what should happen in a given situation.
47. Consumer incentives: The products, services, information, and even other people that are
perceived to satisfy a need.
48. 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.
49. 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.
50. Consumer knowledge: The amount of experience and information that a person has about
particular products or services.
51. Consumer marketing: The marketing of a good or service by one consumer to another.
52. Consumer ritual: Standardized sequences of actions that are periodically repeated.
53. Consumer satisfaction/ dissatisfaction: The general feelings that a consumer develops about a
product or service after its purchase and use.
54. Consumer search behavior: All actions consumers take to identify and obtain information on
the means of solving a problem.

55. Consumer self-control: The ability of people to avoid making purchases that involve pleasure in
the present, but pain in the future.
56. Cross-cultural analysis: The study of foreign cultures and their values, attitudes, languages, and
customs.
57. Cultural ethnocentricity: The feeling among some consumers that the values, beliefs, and ways
of doing things as specified by one's own culture are "right," "correct," and generally better than
those of other cultures.
58. 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.
59. Defense mechanisms: Psychological logical adjustments made by people to keep themselves
from recognizing personality qualities or motives that might lower self-esteem or heighten
anxiety.
60. Difference threshold: The minimum amount of difference in the intensity of a stimulation that
can be detected 50% of the time.
61. Dissociative group: A reference group with whom the person does not wish to be associated.
62. Dissonance: An imbalanced state that results when a logical inconsistency exists among
cognitive elements.
63. Dogmatism: A personality characteristic marked by closed-mindedness and rigidity in the,
approach to the social environment.
64. Drive: An affective state in which a person experiences emotions and physiological arousal.
65. Ego: The component of the personality defined in psychoanalytic theory as standing for reason
and good sense and as following the reality principle.
66. Elaboration likelihood model (ELM): A model proposing that the route to persuasion depends
on the involvement of the consumer. The highly involved consumer engages in greater amounts
of information processing than the less involved consumer.
67. Encoding: The process of transferring information from short-term to long-term memory for
permanent storage.
68. Enculturation: The process of learning one's own culture.
69. 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.
70. Evoked set: Consists of those brands and products recalled from long-term memory that are
acceptable for further consideration.

71. External search: The consumer's soliciting information from outside sources rather than from
his or her memory.
72. Family decision stages: The steps in the decision process used by a family to purchase products
or services.
73. Family life cycle: The idea that families may move through a series of stages in a
developmental fashion.
74. Fashion: A set of behaviors temporarily adopted by a people because they are perceived to be
socially appropriate for the time and situation.
75. Figure-ground: A principle of perception whereby the figure is the object observed moving
against the ground. The ground is the context or background within which the figure is
observed.
76. 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.
77. Habitual purchases: Purchases that occur as a result of a habit.
78. Halo effect: The concept that positive or negative feelings about one characteristic will
generalize to influence feelings about other, possibly unrelated, characteristics.
79. Hedonic consumption: The consumption of products and services based primarily on the desire
to experience pleasure and happiness.
80. Hedonism: The desire to gain pleasure through the senses.
81. 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.
82. Internal search: The first phase of the search process, in which the consumer attempts to
retrieve from long-term memory information on products or services that will help to solve a
problem.
83. Internalization: Occurs when an individual accepts influence because it is intrinsically
rewarding.
84. Interpersonal processes: The communications that occur between two people at any particular
point in time.
85. Interpretation: A process whereby people draw upon their experience, memory, and
expectations to interpret and attach meaning to a stimulus.Interpretation process:
86. : Qualitative methods in which the researcher attempts to identify the meanings of the symbols
and rituals employed by consumers.

87. Involuntary attention: An innate response that occurs when a consumer is exposed to something
surprising, novel, threatening, or unexpected.
88. Involvement: The level of perceived personal importance or interest evoked by a stimulus (or
stimuli) within a specific situation.
89. Just noticeable difference (JND): The minimum amount of difference in the intensity of a
stimulus that can be detected 50% of the time.
90. 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)
91. Operant conditioning: A process in which the frequency of occurrence of a behavior is modified
by the consequences of the behavior.
92. Opinion leader: Consumers who influence the purchase decisions of others.
93. Perception: The process through which individuals are exposed to information, attend to that
information and comprehend it.
94. Perceptual organization: How people perceive the shapes, forms, figures, and lines in their
visual world.
95. Peripheral route to persuasion: Persuasion that occurs in low involvement circumstances when
little information elaboration is provided.
96. 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.
97. Problem recognition: The discovery of discrepancy between an actual and a desired state of
being.
98. Reference group: A group whose value, norms, attitudes or beliefs are used as a guide for
behavior by an individual.
99. Repeat purchase behavior: The consumer is merely buying a product repeatedly, without any
particular product for it.
100.

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

number of times.