Consumer Psychology

It’s Sunday afternoon, time for your weekly grocery run. Following a busy workweek, you find the energy to get all of the ingredients at your local family-run grocer for your latest favorite dish—pad thai, a relatively healthy mix of noodles, protein, and vegetables. Yet, as you’re checking out, you can’t help but grab that Kit Kat that’s taunting you from above the conveyor belt. It’s been a long week, you deserve it. Once you get home to prepare dinner, you think to yourself: “Why did I buy this Kit Kat?” Your entire shopping experience, including your guilty Kit Kat purchase, can be explained by consumer psychology.

Consumer psychology is the study of how humans, groups, or organizations make decisions about what they buy, use, or support for any given purchase.¹ This decision-making includes how we find, select, and dispose of products, services, or experiences.² The thought process behind your sugar craving for a Kit Kat, from the placement of chocolate bars in the check-out aisle versus the vegetables on the sidelines, is all part of consumer psychology.  This branch of psychology explores the cognitive, emotional, and social factors that influence purchasing behaviors, which can include your own perceptions, values, and feelings. When companies seek to understand what drives consumers, their research can reveal patterns in decision-making that they can use to design strategies to meet consumer needs—leading to that buying point for a chocolate bar. 

While consumer psychology focuses on the mental processes driving decisions, like emotions and motivations, from an individual point of view, the related concept of consumer behavior also examines broader actions and patterns of consumption, including societal and cultural influences. If you were in Thailand buying the ingredients for your pad thai, consumer behavior might help elucidate the wider cultural differences between North American and Southeast Asian buying patterns in grocery stores—or other marketplaces. These broader influences have an impact on an individual’s mental decision-making when it comes to whether or not they make a purchase, and are important to consider.

Consumer psychology bridges fields like behavioral science and marketing, providing insights into how biases, habits, and environmental cues lead to specific consumer behaviors. For instance, principles like social proof explain why people are influenced by popular trends, while concepts like decision fatigue highlight how too many choices can overwhelm and deter buyers. By applying these insights, consumer psychology not only helps businesses succeed but also enables policymakers to promote healthier and more sustainable consumer behaviors. At the same time, this shows us how companies can take advantage of human psychology—influencing people to make purchasing decisions that may be detrimental, wasteful, or unaffordable.

Different Consumer Styles for Different Purchases 

How you decide to purchase something depends on what you want to buy. When you buy a Kit Kat, it's a much simpler decision than buying a house. There are four types of consumer, or buyer, behavior styles, as defined by two dimensions: how involved the consumer is with the product and the amount of perceived differences between brands. These consumer behavior styles may shed light on how consumer psychologists can help brands strategize marketing in catered and efficient ways. We can understand the buyer behavior styles, what they are, and when they manifest as follows:³

What Influences Consumer Decision-making?

If you were getting groceries with your friend, would they buy that Kit Kat at the check-out aisle just like you did? Understanding how purchasing decisions are made—and how products are consumed and experienced—is central to consumer psychology. In other words, the context of a purchase matters. A relevant concept that we can borrow from marketing research is the buyer behavior model, as follows:⁴

Not every single influence on our purchasing decisions can be fully accounted for, as it is a complex process that varies for each individual. Still, we can look at a handful of general external and internal factors. Broadly speaking, we can think of the external, society-wide factors as relating to consumer behavior, while the internal, individualist factors are more related to consumer psychology. These factors intertwine and are inseparable in reality, but modeling buyer behavior helps break down the possible elements affecting a purchase. This is a lot to process all at once, so let’s break down the buyer behavior model further with our Kit Kat impulse buy. 

As we can see in the buyer behavior model, understanding the decision-making process involves internal and external considerations when analyzing the consumer’s thought process before, during, and after buying a product or service. Let’s take a closer look at how this works in action:⁴