Consumer Psychology is the study of the reasons, which are more often than not irrational contrary to the usual assumptions, that affect the consumer’s purchase decisions. The reasons include all the smallest of details you can possibly imagine because even though the conscious brain does not pick those things up, the unconscious does and that’s where all the major decisions occur before being transferred to the conscious and out into the world.
Over the past 30-40 years there has been tremendous advancement in the field of behavioral economics that showed how flawed the standard economics models are and have huge gaping holes in them, yet businesses still use it as a yardstick to check the successfulness of incentives given by them to their customers to induce them to buy and dictate other thing in business.
Big companies spend a lot of money on consumer research, millions of dollars literally every year and a lot of small businesses use that as an excuse, that it costs too much. It’s true consumer research costs a lot but applying the research costs almost nothing, that’s right, it doesn't cost much to apply the things that have already been established. It's just the matter of spending time and effort in order to learn about those things, that’s all it takes. And the potential return on that invested time and effort is tremendous.
I am not asking small business owners to get into the deep end of consumer psychology and spend days and weeks trying to understand all the details, but business owners now a days do have to be sensitive to the science behind consumer psychology, with the ever increasing pace and informational crunch consumers are spending less and less time consciously thinking about purchases and therefore influencing the unconscious of the consumers is becoming increasingly important.
The evidence suggests that the ever accelerating pace and informational crush of modern life will make this particular form of unthinking compliance, choosing to buy products without full rationalization, more and more prevalent in the future. It will be increasingly important for businesses to understand the how and why of automatic influence.
