Posts Tagged Consumers
Social Psychology: The Psychological Explanations of Social Phenomena
The various aspects of social psychology could be examined within the wide concepts of intelligence, gender, advertising, consumer culture, stress and psychological issues that define society. Considering consumer behaviour, social psychology uses convincing theories to explain addictive consumption, the influence of advertising and the phenomenon of purchasing. Advertising is seen as a subtle psychological manipulation as it creates desires and anxiety in the potential consumers (Papers4you.com, 2006).
Advertising can have both psychological and commercial aspects including misattribution, bias, suggestibility, and could be studied from global or local perspectives. Organisational consumption is seen as different from individual consumption although generic psychological theories of human motivation such as that of Maslow and Freud can explain consumer behaviour. However consumer behaviour can also be studied in terms of the notion of quality and its relation to customer satisfaction (Silva et al, 2005).
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The Psychology of Consumerism
On the marketing and behavioral aspects of consumerism and the advantages and disadvantages of consumerism
Consumerism is in a way the more human aspect of business and companies and businesses consider consumers along with their employees as the essential ‘people elements’ of their endeavor. Yet consumerism can have its other meanings and represent a culture of buying, highlight the virtues and vices of a materialistic society and emphasize on the importance of globalized business environment. Companies have to keep their consumers happy and develop and sell new products based on consumer needs. The needs of the consumers and the needs of businesses however seem to be circular as companies create needs of consumers and consumers also project their needs to businesses suggesting an interdependent relationship. When I say, companies create consumer needs, we can consider the example of Apple iPhone. Apple successfully created a need in consumers to possess a product that would successfully integrate the phone and the iPod. Of course Apple must have also done the initial survey to find out what consumer needs or demands are and then finally expanded and focused on these consumer needs to come up with the new products, including the iPhone. A good company is the one that can provide realistic and well defined frameworks for initial vague consumer needs. The needs of the consumers are initially not well defined or clear as consumers tend to have some idea about what they want but are not too sure about what they actually want. So through surveys and discussions with consumers and in house technical or product development advisers, companies are able to develop on these initial consumer ideas and vague consumer needs and provide shape to their future product plans.
Yet we could first try to define consumerism and understand why consumerism is such an important aspect of business and marketing. The term consumerism seems to have both positive and negative connotations as consumerism could mean a culture of possessions and glorification of materialism. Consumerism could however also mean progressively more consumption of goods and products that could benefit the economy and the markets with a heightened buying culture among people although consumerism could also mean the entire gamut of marketing and business activities that finally lead to the buying of products by consumers.
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