important terms in Consumer Behavior

Important terms in Consumer Behavior 

1. Absolute Threshold: The lowest level at which an individual can experience a sensation.
   
   
   
   
   
2. Acculturation: The learning of a new or foreign (other country’s) culture.
3. Actual Self-Image: The image that an individual possess as a certain kind of person with certain characteristic traits, habits, behavior etc.
4. Advertising Wearout: Overexposure to repetitive advertising that causes individuals to become satiated and their attention and retention to decline.
5. Advetorials: Print ads which are laid out to resemble editorial material making it difficult for the readers to distinguish between the two.
6. Affective Component: It is a part of tri-component attitude model which reflect the consumer’s emotion or feeling with regard to an object or a person or an idea.
7. Affinity Group Marketing: A type of cause-related marketing targeted to members of a specific group.
8. Affluent Consumers: The consumers with household incomes which provide them with a disproportionate large share of all discretionary income.
9. AIOs: These are the psychographic variables that focus on Activities, Interests, and Opinions often referred to as Lifestyle.
10. Arousal of Motives: The motives which are often aroused on the basis of physiological, emotional, cognitive or environmental factors.
11. Attitude: It is the learned predisposition to behave in a favourable or unfavourable with regard to a particular thing.
12. Beliefs: These are the mental or verbal statements that reflect an individual’s knowledge and assessment about certain things.
13. Benefit Segmentation: A basis of segmentation which is based on the kinds of benefits that consumers seek for in a product or service.
14. Brand Equity: The value associated with a brand.
15. Brand Loyalty: Consistent preference and/or purchase of the same brand.
16. Brand Personification: Specific “personality-type” traits or attributes ascribed by consumers for different brands.
17. Cause-related Marketing: A form of corporate promotion in which companies try to motivate socially-aware consumers to buy their products by promising to contribute a portion of the sale to a specific cause.
18. Cognitive Component: A part of the tri-component attitude model which represents the knowledge, perception, and beliefs that a consumer has with respect to an idea or an object.
19. Cognitive Dissonance: The dissonance or discomfort that consumers experience as a result of conflicting information.
20. Compliant Individual: The individual who moves towards others and want to be loved, wanted, and appreciated by others.
21. Conative Component: A part of the tri-component attitude model which reflects a consumer’s likelihood or tendency to behave in a particular way with regard to an attitude-object. 
22. Concentrated Marketing: It is targeting a product or service to a single market segment with a unique marketing mix.
23. Conditioned Learning: It results when a stimulus which elicits a known response that serves to produce the same response by itself.
24. Consumer Behaviour: The type of behavior which consumers display in searching for purchasing, using, evaluating, and disposing of products or services.
    
25. Consumer Ethnocentrism: A consumer’s predisposition to accept or reject foreign-made products.
26. Consumer Learning: The process by which consumers acquire the purchase and consumption knowledge and experience they apply to future related behavour.
27. Consumer Profile: Socio-economic/Demographic/Psychographic profile of actual or proposed consumers for a specific product or service.
28. Counter segmentation: It is a segmentation strategy in which a company combines two or more segments into a single segment to be targeted with an individually tailored product or promotion campaign.
29. Cross-Cultural Consumer Analysis: Research to determine the extent to which consumers of two or more nations are similar in respect to specific consumption behavior.
30. Cues: Stimuli that give direction to consumer motives.
31. Culture: The sum total of learned beliefs, values, and customs which serve to regulate the consumer behaviour.
32. Demographic Segmentation: The division of a total market into smaller subgroups on the basis of such characteristics such as age, gender, marital status, education, occupation and income.
33. Detached Personality: An individual who moves away from others.
34. Differentiated Marketing: Targeting a product or service to two or more segments, using a specifically tailor-made product, promotion appeal, price etc.
35. Diffusion Process: The process by which the acceptance of an innovation is spread by communication to members of a social system over a period of time.
36. Ego: The part of personality that serves as the individual’s conscious control.  It functions as an internal monitor that balances the impulsive demands of the id and the socio-cultural constraints of the superego.
37. Elaboration Likelihood Model (ELM): A theory which suggests that an individual’s level of involvement during message processing is a critical factor in determining which route to persuasion is likely to be effective.
38. Evoked Set: The specific brands a consumer considers in making a purchase choice in a particular product category.
39. Family Life Cycle: Classification of family units into significant groupings like Bachelorhood, Honeymooners, Parenthood, Postparenthood, and Dissolution.
40. Geographic Segmentation: It is dividing the market based on geographical territories.
41. Green Marketing: Marketing activity that involves environmental claims.
42. Halo Effect: A situation in which the perception of a person on a multitude of dimensions is based on the evaluation of just one or few dimensions.
    
43. Ideal Self-Image: It is how individuals like to perceive themselves.
44. Inert Set: Brands that a consumer is indifferent towards because they are perceived as having no particular advantage.
45. Infomercial: These are thirty minute commercials that appear to the average viewer as documentatires and thus command more attentive viewing than obvious commercials would receive.
46. Instrumental Conditioning: A behavioural theory of learning based on a trial-and-error process, with habits formed as the result of positive experiences resulting from certain responses or bahaviours.
47. Just Noticeable Difference: It is the minimal difference which can be detected between two stimuli.
48. Market Segmentation: Dividing the heterogeneous market into homogeneous clusters.
49. Motivation: The force which drives an individual for an action.
50. Opinion Leader: A person who informally gives product information and advice to others.
51. Perception: It is the process by which an individual selects, organizes and interprets stimuli into meaningful and coherent picture of the world.
52. Positivism: A consumer behaviour approach that regards consumer behaviour discipline as an applied marketing science.  It’s main focus is on consumer decision making.
53. Post-purchase Dissonance: The cognitive dissonance which occurs after a consumer has made a purchase commitment. 
54. Reference Group: A person or group which serves as a point of comparison for an individual in the formation of either general or specific values, attitudes, or behaviour.
55. Social Marketing: The use of marketing concepts and techniques to win adoption of socially beneficial ideas.
56. Social Self-Image: It is how individuals feel others see them.
57. Stimulus: Any unit of input to any of the senses.
58. Superego: The part of personality that reflects society’s moral and ethical codes of conduct.
59. Use-related Segmentation: Popular and effective form of segmentation that categorizes consumers in terms of product, service, or brand image characteristics such as usage rate, awareness and degree of brand loyalty.
60. Use-situation Segmentation: It is segmentation which is based on the idea that the occasion or situation often determines what consumers will purchase or consume.
61. Word-of-Mouth Communication: It is informal conversations concerning products or services.