Consumers in Context

The BPM Research Program

Gordon Foxall

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781138962958
• eBook ISBN: 9781317332954
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

This book, first published in 1996, presents a collection of papers by Gordon Foxall charting the development of the Behavioural Perspective Model (BPM) which he devised in the early 1980s and subsequently developed.

The model offers a unique and original behaviour-based theory of consumer choice. In seeking to answer the question 'where does consumer choice take place?' by drawing upon behavioural psychology, Foxall presents an exciting challenge to previous theories whose emphasis has been on the internal working of the consumer's mind in reaching rational decisions and choices.

Bringing alive the important subject of economic consumption, this seminal volume will be of great interest to students and researchers in consumer research.

Part I

Introduction

1 An approach to consumer psychology

This chapter introduces the BPM research program:

• its origin as a reaction to the exclusivity of the cognitivism which dominated consumer research in the early 1980s (and which still holds sway);

• the exposition of the Behavioral Perspective Model of consumer choice to which the program gave rise (including its development, refinement and application to such areas as purchase and consumption, saving and financial asset management, the adoption and diffusion of innovations, and the management of environmental conservation through social demarketing);

• and the role of that model in interpreting consumer behavior within a pluralistic framework.

The final part of the chapter discusses the conceptual development of the model as these chapters have been written and outlines current and future theoretical and empirical concerns.

THE BPM RESEARCH PROGRAM

Consumer research is overwhelmingly cognitive in its approach to knowledge and explanation. As it has developed over the last thirty to forty years, it has increasingly reflected the view that consumers are most accurately portrayed as information processors whose activities can be appropriately understood on the analogy of the digital computer. This emphasis can be traced to the adoption-of-innovations and consumer-behavior-as-decision-making depictions pursued by the midwest agricultural extension colleges of the 1950s and early 1960s (e.g., Gartner, Kolmer and Jones 1960). It found its fullest expression in the late 1960s in the so-called ‘comprehensive models’ (Engel, Kollat and Blackwell 1968; Howard and Sheth 1969; Nicosia 1966) which have provided the broad paradigm for consumer research in the context of marketing ever since.

Its influence since then is apparent from the extent to which it has been absorbed by all mainstream consumer behavior textbooks, and by the way in which articles in the mainstream journals continue to be devoted to incremental methodological advances of its explanatory variables and postulated relationships. The ontology it assumes is seldom questioned and, on the rare occasions when explanatory systems based on antithetical assumptions are considered, they are often presented, if only for expository reasons, within a quasi-cognitive framework such as the social behaviorism of Bandura (1977). Even the somewhat hesitant trend in consumer research towards postmodern and other interpretive approaches which concentrate on the ‘experience’ of consumption (often justified within a call for a more pluralistic basis for theorization, explanation and, as though it were something else, understanding) is strictly post-positivist in its exclusivity. As Chapter 15 argues, the pluralism advocated in this context does not seek to wrestle with the epistemological consequences of positivism as it actually exists and interprets (see, for instance, Hirschman and Holbrook 1992). Consumer research has become an intellectually safe, if often technically demanding, pursuit.

The resulting concentration on the search for intrapersonal determinants of choice has had the effect of decontextualizing consumer behavior. Because of this, consumer psychology lacks a developed perspective on the situational influences that shape purchase and consumption, saving and investment, the adoption of innovations, and other facets of consumer choice. There are, to be sure, checklists of the components of situations, empirical studies that take perceived – and occasionally objective – situational influences on board, and some awareness that the environment must be taken into consideration at some stage. But consumer research can still give no systematic account of the nature of situational influence on consumer behavior. The context of which it robs consumer behavior has two interactive components. It consists first of the history of the consumer: what he or she has done in the past, and the consequences of having done it. Its other element is the consumer’s current surroundings, the behavior they invite or discourage, and the consequences they signal as likely to follow that behavior, i.e., the behavior setting. The concept of the consumer situation which lies at the heart of the later chapters of this book captures these sources of influence and relates their interaction to specific patterns of consumer behavior.

The book is the record of an intellectual journey which began in the early 1980s with a profound dissatisfaction with the widespread assumption of attitudinal–behavioral correspondence which underpins so much theory and practice in consumer research and, indeed, the study of economic behavior generally. This emphasis is understandable, since the authority of the cognitive model, as it has been applied and developed in consumer research, is entirely dependent upon the empirical demonstration of consistency among its outputs: attitudes, intentions and behavior. An enormous amount of effort has been devoted to shoring up this relationship, even as the ultimate dependence of the relationship among these variables has been shown to rely upon situational factors and the situational similarity of the context in which they are expressed (Foxall 1983, 1984a – Chapter 4 in the present volume). The critique of the attitude-intentions-behavior notion takes up the early chapters of the book; subsequent chapters trace the emergence of an alternative approach; and the final chapters detail the derivation, refinement, application and evaluation of a behavior-based model of consumer choice which stands as an alternative not only to that which assumes attitudinal–behavioral consistency but to the whole cognitive framework within which such a fancy could originate.

The journey has taken the visible form of a series of monographs in which the main ideas have been worked out, interspersed with shorter articles which have applied the conclusions of that thinking to marketing theory and practice, including management and commercial as well as academic consumer research. An important function of the program has been to demonstrate that theoretical consumer research can contribute to the understanding of practical marketing management.

Two themes recur in the following chapters which address central managerial and applied research concerns in marketing: the attitude–behavior relationship which underlies so much market research and managerial judgment, and consumer innovativeness which, together with the assumption of attitudinal–behavioral consistency, underpins so many aspects of new product development. The longer, more theoretical monographs may appear at first sight far removed from the practical concerns of managerial marketing, but the shorter, more applied articles show that they raise issues of vital import to our understanding of marketing. Moreover, it is also apparent from reading the longer and shorter pieces sequentially that the latter have had a considerable effect on theory development. The saying that There is nothing more practical than a good theory’ is too hackneyed to be quoted spontaneously, but like all clichés it makes a good point.

The following chapters, which consist of those monographs and articles, are presented in the order in which they were written.

THE BPM: PROVENANCE

Part II, Provenance, contains seven chapters. Initially, they explicate the previously mentioned dissatisfaction with the inability of attitude and intention measures to predict behavior other than under situations that provide the closest situational correspondence; they go on to outline the need for and possible nature of an alternative paradigm. This search for an alternative construal is actually apparent right from the beginning: the empirical evidence on attitudinal–behavioral consistency is shown in Chapter 2 to be amenable to a behavior-based interpretation as well as one based upon cognitive processing. The chapter goes on to discuss the more general possibility that behaviorism might uniquely elucidate consumer behavior. (See also Foxall 1983.)

This reasoning is applied in Chapters 3 and 4 to current preoccupations in marketing research and new product development. These chapters extend the attitude–behavior problem to cognitivism in general (as it has been understood and used in marketing and consumer research). Again the need for another understanding is apparent: Chapter 3 concludes with a call for something more appropriate in the light of the evidence for situational influence on consumer behavior than the prevailing attitude–intention–behavior idea, and Chapter 4 points more explicitly to the need to take account of the direct impact of situations upon consumer choice. (See also Foxall 1984b.)

The remaining chapters in Part II are concerned to move beyond the problem identified in the preceding three and to suggest a solution – or at least to flesh out an alternative conceptualization. Chapter 5, something of a watershed chapter, begins the search for a structure that systematically relates behavior to its situational influences by examining the possibility that behaviorism would be useful to this task; a case is made that radical behaviorism may have some methodological advantages over other forms of behaviorism. At this stage, while the research program was centrally concerned still with the inadequacies of latent process explanations (attitudes/innate innovativeness/reciprocal causation), the direction of the intellectual quest was clearly turning towards radical behaviorism. This chapter lacks the confident vision apparent in Chapters 2–4, which chart the shortcomings of attitude psychology and assertively derive conclusions about the nature and limitations of cognitive consumer research. Chapter 5 seeks an alternative but offers little to convince the reader that Skinner’s work holds the answer. The confidence returns in the following chapters which discover and establish a definite epistemological role for radical behaviorism.

Hence, while Chapter 5 sketches the alternative theory required, Chapter 6 describes in some depth the impediment to scientific progress in consumer research for which a largely unchallenged cognitivism was held responsible and the advantages of an extended theoretical base for consumer research are laid out in the context of the role of an ‘active interplay of competing theories’ in the growth of knowledge (Feyerabend 1975). Radical behaviorism, it is asserted now, must be a vital ingredient in a critical, pluralistic consumer research.

These themes are applied further in Chapter 7 which refines the nature of a radical behaviorist approach to consumer choice and its value as an alternative source of explanation. In this case, the focus is on consumers’ innovative behavior (compare the more committed treatment here to the sketch provided in Chapter 5). By now a place has been established for radical behaviorism in consumer research, albeit as a critical standpoint from which to assess cognition, rather than a central theory in its own right. If it is to occupy that role, it must itself be subjected to a conceptual overhaul.

Part II concludes, therefore, with a critical examination of radical behaviorism as a contributor to consumer research. Chapter 8 demonstrates that it is feasible to describe the marketing mix – containing the main elements of managerial influence on consumer behavior – in terms of operant behaviorism. But it also raises issues derived from the fact that human behavior is rule-governed (influenced by statements that specify the consequences of behaving in a particular way) as well as contingency-shaped (influenced by direct contact with the environment). To the extent that consumer research had been at all concerned with operant conditioning to this point, it had been generally assumed that human behavior, like that of other animals, was entirely contingency-shaped (cf. Berry and Kunkel 1970). This chapter not only introduces some of the philosophical and practical problems to be explored in depth in Parts III and IV; it also ties up the dominant theme of Part II by harking back to the questions of attitudinal–behavioral consistency (conceived now as verbal/nonverbal behavioral consistency).

PARENTHESIS: OPERANT BEHAVIOR

While Chapter 8 therefore conveniently links Part II with the remainder of the book, the underlying continuity was actually worked out in detail in the book, Consumer Psychology in Behavioral Perspective (Foxall 1990). This work continues a description and appraisal of radical behaviorism through the emergence of a model of consumer behavior that is founded upon the preceding critique. The Behavioral Perspective Model of purchase and consumption (BPM) was so called to emphasize that it is an approach to consumer psychology, a complement to the cognitive, economic, hermeneutical, psychodynamic and other perspectives already available. In omitting to contextualize consumer behavior, consumer researchers not only failed to develop a situational theory of choice; they also ignored one of the most developed paradigms in behavioral science, radical behaviorism. The aim of the model has been to incorporate radical behaviorism’s unique perspective into academic consumer research. Since radical behaviorism gets such a bad press, much of it undeserved, a few words of explanation may be useful.

Radical behaviorism presents one of the least complicated explanations of behavior currently available. In essence, it maintains, on the basis of empirical evidence gained in simple, experimental settings, that the probability of a response depends upon the consequences that similar responses have produced in the past. When those consequences have been followed by an increase in the rate of responding, they are known as reinforcers because they seem to ‘strengthen’ the behavior. When they have resulted in a decrease in the probability of the beh...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Part I Introduction
• Part II Provenance
• Part III Exposition
• Part IV Denouement
• Name index
• Subject index