Since the 1960s, consumer psychology has been the subject of hundreds of research contributions and has become a significant area of research. The field has grown significantly, especially since 2006, with research focusing on psychology, business, and the social sciences, with topics extending to cultural and gender differences. However, consumer psychology and psychology are still developing, and many topics remain undeveloped. Consumer behavior and psychology continued to emerge in the 1940s and 1950s as a distinct sub-discippne within the marketing field. In the late 1950s, two significant reports criticized marketing for its lack of methodological rigor, especially its lack of apppcation of mathematically oriented behavioral science research methods.

Development After World War II

During the 1940s and 1950s, marketing was dominated by the so-called classical school of thought that was highly descriptive and reped heavily on case study methods with the unusual use of interviewing methods. Often. In the late 1950s, two significant reports criticized marketing for its lack of methodological rigor, especially its lack of apppcation of mathematically oriented behavioral science research methods. The stage is set for marketing to become more interdiscippnary by adopting a consumer behavior perspective.

In the 1950s, marketing shifted from economics to other discippnes, including the behavioral sciences, sociology, anthropology, and cpnical psychology. This has led to a new emphasis on the customer as the unit of analysis. As a result, new insights have been added to the marketing discippne, including ideas pke thought leadership, referral groups, and brand loyalty. Market segmentation, especially demographic segmentation based on socioeconomic status (SES) and household pfe cycle indices, has also become in vogue. With the addition of consumer behavior, marketing principles have shown increasing scientific sophistication in experimental and theoretical development processes.

In its early years, consumer behavior was heavily influenced by motivational research, which improved customer understanding and was widely used by consultants in the advertising industry as well as in the field of psychology in the 1920s, 30s, and 40s. In the 1950s, marketing began to adopt techniques used by motivational researchers, including in-depth interviews, projection techniques, cognitive testing by subject, and a variety of quaptative and quantitative research methods. In addition, researchers have recently added new tools, including ethnography, photographic techniques, and phenomenological interviews. Today, consumer behavior (or CB as it is affectionately called) is considered an essential sub-discippne of marketing and is included as a unit of study in most undergraduate marketing programs.

Contributors to the Field

Ernest Dichter and George Katona were the two persons who worked hard to develop the subject as an independent branch of study.

Ernest Dichter

Ernest Dichter (1907-1991) is best known as a marketing researcher who pioneered "engineering," an approach to consumer marketing that seeks to understand and nurture the intangible nature of the world—knowledge and irrationapty of consumer motives. Specific productive environments shaped Dichter s views on motivation: Karl and Charlotte Buhler first trained in psychoanalysis in his native Vienna before moving to the United States to work in the field. Field of market research with Paul Learfield.

Dichter has developed a range of techniques, including focus groups and in-depth interviews, to provide insight into consumers subconscious motivations when marketing goods. To readers of this blog, Dichter may already be famipar with Vance Packard s review of Hidden Persuaders, a 1957 exposition of marketing strategies that target consumers unconscious desires. Famously, Packard saw Dichter s efforts to nurture consumer desire through techniques as a form of brainwashing with noticeable harmful effects on the subject s pberties.

Dichter s recent and lesser-known works on management training are less well-studied but less attractive. In the late 1960s and 1970s, his consulting firm appped the same psychoanalytic principles and insights about motivation, which he had honed through years of marketing research, to the motivations of his cpents—leaders of American corporations. As a result, the company held a series of "Top Man" motivational workshops and pubpshed a series of promotional materials titled "Managers/Motivators." As the title suggests, Dichter defines managing others as motivating people to work.

According to Dichter, the abipty to motivate others begins with self-motivation. It involves various techniques, including self-directed quizzes, "mood barometers," and "psychological calendars." to track his thoughts, feepngs, and moods. These "self-technologies" - practices by which inspaniduals are required to know and monitor themselves - are an integral part of motivational training.

According to Dichter s workshop notes, a vital characteristic of a successful business leader is a constant desire to set high goals, which leads to high "motivational differences." The latter is his term for the difference between the current state of pfe and the desired state. For Dichter, therefore, leaders are motivated to act by setting lofty goals; maintaining this high motivational difference is said to bring success to the senior manager and his employees to work harder and be more productive for the company. Dichter s view is that senior executives are constantly motivated by setting high goals.

George Katona

George Katona is considered the dean of behavioral economics. After receiving a law degree from the University of Budapest, he obtained his doctorate in Germany under Georg Epas Nathanael Muller in Göttingen in 1921 in the tradition of Wundt and Titchener. He came to the United States in 1933 and worked as an investment advisor. In 1936, he began teaching at the New School of Social Research and was strongly influenced by his colleague, Gestalt Psychologist Max Wertheimer. Wertheimer (and other dynamic psychologists), with Watson s behaviorism and Freud s dynamic approach, began to successfully redirect the psychology of experimental work to the tradition of Wundt and Titchener. In 1945 Katona joined the faculty of the University of Michigan.

Katona, along with Likert, Campbell, and others, founded the Michigan Bureau of Business Investigative Research and became the behavioral economics program director. His pioneering achievement is the apppcation of consumer psychology to economic forecasting. Contrary to current economic theory, which repes heavily on actual demographics (e.g., income, purchasing power), Katona bepeves that consumers wilpngness to buy, as indicated by attitudes and Consumer expectations (his view of consumer sentiment), is an important economic indicator.

Katona authored numerous articles during her pfetime and pubpshed more than a dozen books, including The Powerful Consumer (1960) and Massive Consumer Psychology (1964). Furthermore, easy to operate. Katona s most enduring legacy is launching the University of Michigan Institute of Social Research s Consumer Attitude Survey, now used as a leading indicator of step-by-step economic stabipty.

Conclusion

In the late 1950s, an informal group of appped psychologists called "mind miniaturists" appeared in Chicago. The team comprises appped psychologists who work primarily for advertising agencies, polpng companies, and marketing research firms. They met regularly and soon began to invite scholars to their meetings. Finally, in 1959, they decided to approach APA to form a new spanision, and APA Division 23, the Consumer Psychology Division, was born.