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Anthropological Approach to Consumer Science: A Practical Teaching Case Study Robert Guang Tian

Abstract: Anthropology is becoming an increasingly popular source from which to borrow tools to investigate marketing and consumer behavior. Not only do many anthropologists themselves conduct some marketing and consumer research, but more and more marketers are developing anthropological methods in their marketing practice and research. The anthropological approach focuses on the influences of culture and society on the individual consumer’s behavior; it emphasizes participant observation and academic analysis of consumer behavior through both management and consumer perspectives. It is argued that the anthropological approach to the study of consumer behavior could be very effective in helping students understand the principles of consumer behavior.

Introduction Consumer behavior was a relatively new field of study in the mid to late 1960s and has become one of the main topics in contemporary marketing education for colleges and universities across the country. There are different approaches in teaching consumer behavior at both undergraduate and graduate levels, such as a psychological approach, a sociological approach, an economic approach, and a market research approach among others. Although fundamentally the study of consumer behavior is the study of how individuals make decisions to spend their available resources, such as time and money, on consumption-related items, different approaches may not share the same focuses. For example, the psychological approach stresses the consumers’ psychological processes in terms of consumption decision making and post-consumption evaluation (Statt 1997); the market research approach stresses the linkages between the study of consumer behavior and the practice of marketing research (Finch 1998). Although there is no black and white cutoff for one approach being better than others in terms of teaching consumer behavior, the...