Neuroscience

1. Consumption rationales

Buyer behaviour

This perspective regards the consumer as an animal where fundamental needs like sex, food, shelter and sleep (Østegaard & Jantzen, 2000) are the mechanisms that leads the consumer to a certain behaviour (Rescoria, 1988, p. 152). In other words are consumers going through a process of stimuli-response reacting instinctively to different advertisements and other exposure on a daily basis. The consumer are consequently being conditioned to consume in a way that they ”cant stop – wont stop” (trendwatching.com) as a result of being exposed to so much information and sales tacticts each day. They explore new needs for products they did not know they had. In this perspective individuals are researched on through experiments like the famous example of classical conditioning with Pavlov and his dogs, in order to explain why people behave as they do. Marketers can change behaviour when creating an automatic response by conditioning. This is done by creating a link or associations over time so

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when a consumer sees a particular product, it will turn into a conditioned response which is ”likely to increase the probability of some desired response such as product purchase” (Nord & Peter, 1980). Regarding GFC, the issue is all the negative exposure conserning companies using child labour, problems with waste and discharging toxic gases which has an negative impact on the environment and so forth. This can also be seen as negative reinforcement which in GFC leads consumers with a lot of guilt they need to get rid of, and as a result creating a change in the behavioural pattern. They need to buy GFC products that results into absolving their guilt. Another example in order to change behaviour regarding GFC is using operant conditioning, shaping the consumer into a higher probability for certain behaviour (Nord & Peter, 1980). Many stores uses shaping as a tool to attract more customers by e.g. giving them discounts when choosing...