A couple of weeks ago, Forrester Research released a study on the changing habits of today’s consumer and how tech savvy they had become. The conclusion of the study as noted by the New York Times was that nifty technological gadgetry which, in the past, was highly desired by a small segment of the (early adopters) population was now part of the mainstream.

Forrester CEO George Colony, went so far as to say that today’s customer is unrecognizable from 1999′s customer. And the NY times says that we’re all gadget geeks now.

I disagree… » Read more: Consumer Behavior 2009: Why I don’t agree with Forrester

I came across this term in an article on the health care debate on Yahoo.  The article elaborated on the irrational reasons as to why people were on both sides of the health care debate. It also contained a definition of motivated reasoning by sociologist Andrew Perrin of the University of North Carolina. He stated that motivated reasoning was essentially about starting with a conclusion that one hoped to reach and then selectively evaluating evidence in order to reach that conclusion.

I’m always interested in understanding how people think and the reasons for why they act a certain way. And, so, I went back to a book that I had read some time back in business school called Inside consumption: consumer motives, goals, and desires by S. Ratneshwar and David Glen Mick. The authors state that individuals are always aspiring to achieve certain goals in life and some of those goals are met through the marketplace in the form of ‘hope.’ » Read more: Motivated Reasoning – The Irrationality of Human Behavior

I was reading a couple of articles on consumer behavior  by Dr. Lars Perner, an expert in behavioral psychology at  USC. Consumer Behavior is considered a soft science by managers. In today’s know-it-all marketing environments, managers seems to think that they know what the market wants in terms of products and market research, if any, is conducted to confirm those notions rather than being carried out from an exploratory viewpoint. This is really quite disappointing since good consumer research, sometimes, is the difference between success and failure.

Consumer behavior is about understanding the psychology or processes of how consumers think and how they select  a particular brand or product for their use. This field is also about understanding how consumers are affected by their environment like media, family, work etc and how all those factors affect their buying decisions.  » Read more: Consumer Behavior in a Troubled Economy