Abstract

The article focuses on consumer behavior in the U.S. as of 1973. Consumer researchers tend to borrow behavioral insights into specific aspects of humans and apply them diligently to the richness of consumer behavior in affluent societies. Thus from Ph.D. dissertations to journal articles, they find the consumer reduced to three or four variables, with empirical results that obviously differ according to which variables have been chosen. While these differences permit consumer researchers to imitate the form of scholarly debate in the basic behavioral disciplines, this debate may prevent them from searching for those images of the consumer needed by managers and public policy makers. As a consequence, not only are consumer researcher lost in the forest, they are also in danger of losing sight of the tree, which is the consumer. Even the flowcharts that have recently come into use are often graphic devices containing no more information than their corresponding verbal statements. Some flowcharts do help clarify the thinking, but they invite premature translation into sets of econometric specifications.