Interdiscuplinary Study in Consumer Behaviour Essay

With the emergence of a consumer society, increasing consumer power in the market place, the growth in marketing, advertising, sophisticated consumers, ethical wasting disease etc, use of goods and services is recognized as primaeval to modern life. Thus it entails to go into a depth of the diametric approaches to consumer behaviour. near(prenominal) man sciences give a variety of reasons to explain why a consumer behaves in a peculiar(prenominal) way in a condition situation. Studies of consumption investigate how and why society and individuals consume goods and services, and how this affects society and human relationships.These are tack together in many favorable sciences such as economics, psychology, sociology, etc. The present study tries to investigate these theories based on consumption and consumer behaviour and how far these are interlinked as well as antithetic from one another. It is also aimed at studying the relevance of these theories with the help of prim itive data and research. The purpose of this study is to find out whether there is some interlink between the various theories and approaches disposed by different economists, psychologists and sociologists.The possible action framed for the research is that Consumption is greatly crookd by the income factor. The data use in the study was mostly petty(a) in nature from the net and reference to several books. The theories of consumption studied for this purpose are the adopt theory, indifference curve analysis, revealed preference theory, Keynes consumption theory, permanent income hypothesis, relative income hypothesis, life-cycle hypothesis, Maslows Hierarchy of needs, the sociological theories of consumption given(p) by G.Katona, Ruby food turner Norris and the theory of Conspicuous consumption given by Veblen. An attempt has been do to study consumer behaviour with the help of chief(a) data collected from a sample of 40 people from 4 categories namely, students, housewiv es, employees and businessmen. They were asked to rank the different factors that influence their buying behaviour. The influential factors given in the questionnaire were taken from the consumption theories given in economics, sociology as well as psychology as given above.From the analysis of both primary as well as secondary data, it was found that majority of people give importance to their income level. However, it is also found that, besides income factor, people also think about sociological and mental factors while purchasing a commodity such as security, safety, fashion, advertising, soothe and prestige issues. As given in the Sociological theories of G. Katona and Norris, it was seen after the primary data analysis that the economic theory of consumption lacks such social structural variables.Thus it is concluded that in the construction of any consumption function or theory for a particular product, for a particular class of products, or for consumption in general not all economic or sociological or psychological variable is to be regarded as the key determinant. Different combinations of all these three enter into different statements of consumption functions at different situations and time periods according to the necessity or urgency of the wants.