The unpredictable nature of hospitality consumption has much to do with individual preference and the ways in which we categorize decisions. In order to identify relationships, which occur during decision-making, researchers have developed mod- els and frameworks portraying these relationships. These models seek to simplify our theoretical understanding of consumer decision-making. They seek to represent complex variables in order to make them easier to understand. As Teare (1998: 76) suggests ‘Models seek to simulate or approximate as realistically as possible the complications of consumer preference, choice and purchase behaviour’. The question this generates is how useful and relevant are such theories in exploring hospitality consump- tion? Teare argues that theory can be considered valuable if it performs any one or more of the following functions:
䊉 as a means of classifying, organizing and integrating informa- tion relevant to the factual world of business
䊉 as a technique for thinking about marketing problems, and a perspective for practical action
䊉 as an analytical tool kit to be drawn on when required for solving marketing problems
䊉 in order to derive a number of principles, or even laws, of marketing behaviour.
As can be seen from Teare, theories can be considered as a means of bringing together facts in order to comprehend them, and by combining a number of facts into theory a framework is created which aids understanding and anticipation.
Consumer behaviour is a field that incorporates a number of disciplines and thus what may often appear to be conflicting theories in order to investigate and explain this behaviour. As we see in Part One of this book, consumer behaviour can be considered multidisciplinary in origin, however, as we shall see in later parts, consumer behaviour can also be seen as inter- disciplinary, in that disciplines can come together in order to provide new insights to the ways in which we consume Hospitality, Leisure & Tourism Series
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hospitality. A key concern within hospitality marketing is seeking to understand how or why consumers use particular goods and services, and, as we see during the course of this book, this issue is a challenging one. There are many varied reasons, some of which may not be conscious ones, why people consume as they do. To seek to identify patterns of behaviour given such a scenario is clearly a complex undertaking and theories are used to simplify and ‘confirm’ some of this complexity. Chapter 3 considers consumer decision-making models in detail, first by looking at generalized models of consumer decision behaviour, and then by looking at a number of models that have been generated specifically in relation to hospitality consumption.
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The development of consumer behaviour research
It is suggested (Belk, 1995; Gabbott and Hogg, 1998) that the development of an academic discipline within the area of consumption began with the marketing departments in the business schools of the 1950s. Belk, in an extensive analysis of the emergence and transformation of consumer behaviour research, suggests that marketing courses were taught in American universities from the turn of the twentieth. century. However, it was not until the early 1930s that academics in this area began to consider themselves as marketing scholars, rather than econo- mists. Though, as Belk suggests, while from this time there was a formal academic separation of marketing from economics, ideologically the two disciplines continued to be joined.
Statt (1997) dates the emergence of consumer research, as a distinct discipline, to the mid-1960s, suggesting that the main impetus for its development was the practical issue of helping marketing managers understand how the social and behavioural sciences could help in finding specific causes of consumer behaviour and, in particular, consumer buying decisions. According to Statt this focus on what the consumer would do under certain specified conditions became known as the positivist approach. Statt argues that such a positivist approach makes a number of assumptions about consumer research, namely:
1 All behaviour has objectively identifiable causes and effects, all of which can be isolated, studied and measured.
2 When faced with a problem or decision, people process all the information relevant to it.
3 After processing this information people make a rational decision about the best choice or decision to make.
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It became clear, however, that this perspective leaves a lot of human behaviour unaccounted for. As people are continually in relationships with others, particularly in our own field of hospitality, the act of consuming is more complex than simply one of buying and selling at a rational level. While such an analysis is acceptable at a simple level, it is clear that in complex economies it limits our understanding of consumer behaviour. In particular, such an analysis makes little allowance for the fact that in complex economies price is not the dominant factor that motivates choice. In addition, increasing use of media and other technologies which make huge amounts of information available to consumers has an impact on our behaviour. Finally, the positivist approach leaves open the question of an individual’s capacity to process large amounts of information, prior to making decisions. It is clear that the positivist school of thought, with its emphasis on rationality, ignores the symbolic aspects of con- sumption. However, the relationships in which we are involved are important in understanding consumer behaviour because they affect the buying decisions and consumption patterns of everyone involved. As such, consumer behaviour has to be understood within the context of human interaction. This has become known as the interpretivist school of research, and is based on a set of assumptions which include that:
䊉 cause and effect cannot be isolated because there is no single objective reality that everyone can agree on
䊉 reality is an individual’s subjective experience of it, as such each consumers experience is unique
䊉 people are not simply rational information processors or decision makers; this view takes no account of emotion.
The interpretivist school argues that buying behaviour has to be interpreted in the light of a person’s whole consumer experience.
Behaviours adopted by individuals are formed in response to the society within which we operate and the roles that we adopt or which are assigned to us. These roles must be incorporated in any understanding of the ways in which we consume.
The positivist and interpretivist schools of thought have come to be seen as complementary to each other (Statt, 1997). The role of prediction and control is seen as trying to isolate cause and effect in behaviour, while at the same time the importance of understanding the complexity of consumer buying behaviour is emphasized. Contemporary reviews of the literature would indicate three broad approaches to consumption – the economic, positivist (rational) or cognitive consumer, the behavioural, interpretivist consumer (learning) and the experiential consumer (postmodern): Hospitality, Leisure & Tourism Series
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1 The economic consumer. As discussed earlier, the fundamental assumption here is that consumers are logical and adopt a structured approach to consumption. Consumers are expected to make rational decisions, based on an analysis of potential benefits and losses. Using such a model a consumer seeking a beer would investigate all the potential options and consume at the cheapest location. This model assumes that consumption is a series of tasks, which can be seen as a problem-solving exercise, comprising a series of distinct stages. This model generated much of the early literature in consumer behaviour, including many of the consumer decision models, which we consider in Chapter 3.
2 The behavioural consumer. This model is based on the view that consumption is a learned response to stimuli, that is, con- sumers learn to consume as a response to punishment or reward, approach or avoidance. The model is based on the assumption that there is relationship between experience and subsequent behaviour.
3 The experiential consumer. This focus rejects a structural response to experience. Within this school of thought con- sumption is beyond explanation or prediction. Aspects such as choice, decision and learning are seen as modern constructs and are replaced by postmodern constructs such as fantasy, hedonism or symbolism (Gabbott and Hogg, 1998). Post- modern approaches to consumption will be considered in greater depth in Part Three of this book.
Research within consumer behaviour developed in order to assist firms to market consumer goods more successfully, with early studies including tea consumption, film going, shoe purchasing and noodle-eating (Fullerton, 1990). However, as Belk (1995) notes, marketing at this time stressed objective service and product benefits and as such did not stray far from the economic perspective of ‘rationality’. Belk suggests that the economic emphasis in consumption studies declined during the 1950s when the focus moved to that of motivation research. However, this change did not last long and motivation research rapidly declined in academic respectability. A number of causes are suggested for this decline, including a belief that motivation research manipulated the subconscious desires of consumers, and the growth of scientific experimentation within the field (Stern, 1990). Scientific experimentation was founded on the methods and concepts of psychology, and focused on examining the effect of physical features such as pricing, product design and packaging on consumers, using forms of scaled responses. Belk (1995) suggests that the growth of scientific experimentation led
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to a ‘re-rationalization’ of the dominant view of the consumer, with the result that information processing models of consumer behaviour came to the fore. These models perceived of the consumer as acting like a computer, gathering and processing information in a rational manner in order to assist in making decisions. While some effort was made to incorporate aspects of culture, group processes and social influence, texts from this period are largely formed in terms of the consumer as informa- tion processor (Howard and Seth, 1969; Nicosia, 1966).
From the 1970s onwards the discipline of consumer research has grown to be one of the major areas of academic activity, contributing much of the research activity within marketing departments. However, as Belk (1995: 60) suggests, ‘much of this consumer research retains the strong rationality biases inherited from economics and the strong micro biases inherited from marketing’. The value of consumer behaviour research is advo- cated by numerous authors as typified by Swarbrook and Horner (1999: 3) who suggest ‘The subject of consumer behaviour is key to the understanding of all marketing activity, which is carried out to develop, promote and sell hospitality products’. From the 1980s onwards there has been a shift in the dominant per- spectives within consumer research. Belk (1995) suggests that a major cause for this shift has been the move towards multi- disciplinary research in the area, which has led to departments broadening their membership to include anthropologists and sociologists, among other disciplines. As membership of these departments widened, the appeal of laboratory and anonymous scaled attitude measures declined. The result was a move away from a perception of the consumer as an automaton, receiving inputs and, through a process of maximization, producing outputs. The new consumer was perceived as a socially constru- ing individual participating in a multitude of interactions and contexts. Within such a perspective the family is not a decision- making consumption unit, but a consumption reality involving hegemonic control, core and peripheral cultures and subcultures and relationships. Similarly if we consider goods and services within the paradigm of new consumption studies a product such as a hotel is not simply a system of sleeping and eating rooms, but can be seen as a venue for fun, prestige, power, sex, etc.
Belk’s argument is taken up by Campbell (1995) when he suggests that, during the 1980s and 1990s, developments both within academia and within society at large have resulted in the sociology of consumption taking centre stage. As we have previously discussed, this may be the result of a commonplace view that contemporary society is grounded in consumption, rather than as previously in aspects of production. The use of the Hospitality, Leisure & Tourism Series
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term ‘consumer culture’ is now widely expressed in a range of aspects of everyday life. Such a focus on a consumer society is taken to suggest that not only is the economy structured around the promotion and selling of goods and services rather than their production, but also that members of such a society will treat high levels of consumption as indicative of social success. As a result consumption will be seen as a life goal for members of such a society. This argument is confirmed by Ritzer (1999: 2) when he states: ‘Consumption plays an ever-expanding role in the lives of individuals around the world. To some, consumption defines contemporary American society, as well as much of the rest of the developed world.’
Within the hospitality industry, and in hospitality education, consumption and consumer behaviour has not been well repre- sented. The focus within hospitality has long been on marketing planning; witness the numerous textbooks that are available to students. In the few cases where consumer behaviour has been taken as a key focus of a book it is dealt with from a marketing perspective, viewing the consumer as the object rather than the subject of the text. Given that the prescribed focus of the hospitality industry is supposedly on the consumer, this seems to be a major oversight. A very small number of hospitality-based consumer behaviour texts are available, the best of which are probably those by Bareham (1995), which focuses on the consumption of food, and, albeit more in the field of tourism studies, Swarbrook and Horner (1999). In addition, Teare (1990;
1994; 1998) has written a large number of articles within this area, but many of these are firmly based in a modernist perspective of cognitive decision-making. In the main, however, consumer behaviour has been dealt with in one chapter of hospitality marketing textbooks; clearly, this is inadequate for such a complex phenomena.
When writing this text I have sought to avoid some of the difficulties indicated above. This text investigates consumer behaviour by emphasizing the behaviour of real consumers and then showing how marketers seek to influence that behaviour.
The book, unlike many existing texts, is interdisciplinary in nature and provides critical analysis of consumer behaviour from a sociological, psychological, economic and historical back- ground, while always grounding such analysis within the contemporary hospitality industry. In addition, the text takes the perspective that effective marketing involves focusing organiza- tional activity on the consumer. Thus the book concentrates on an understanding of determining customer needs, the factors which are relevant in consumer buying behaviour and the effectiveness of many contemporary marketing techniques.
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Summary
The chapter introduces and explores the role of consumer behaviour theory within the discipline of hospitality manage- ment, in order to assist students in understanding and applying the concepts of consumer behaviour to hospitality contexts and markets. This has been undertaken through defining consumer behaviour, considering the context of this book, that is, the contemporary hospitality industry, investigating a number of the reasons for the huge growth in interest in hospitality consump- tion and considering some of the means that have been used to research what is clearly one of the most important phenomenon of the contemporary industry. Many of the themes introduced within this chapter will be explored in greater detail throughout the remainder of this book.
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C H A P T E R
• • • • 2
Consuming hospitality services
K e y t h e m e s
䊉 Increasing attention has been paid in recent years to the marketing and consumption of services such as hospitality, a change brought about due to recognition that services are increasingly important in economic terms.
䊉 Despite substantial evidence to the contrary, however, much marketing and consumer behaviour literature within hospitality
management is predicated on the belief that goods, products and services are essentially the same and can be investigated as such.
䊉 This chapter considers the consumption of hospitality services through an investigation of the contemporary literature, focusing on the ways in which the hospitality offer differs from that of physical goods.
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