Psychology

The foundations of consumer psychology in a broad historical sense can be traced back to the rapid industrial growth witnessed in the latter part of the nineteenth century in the United States, where the productivity that characterized the new industrial age enabled the expansion of consumerism on an unprecedented scale. With such growth in the range and availability of consumer products came a parallel expansion in the emerging advertising industry and, of course, an even keener interest in understanding (and harnessing) the psychological impact of advertisements on the consumer. The early growth in consumer psychology was therefore driven by a mixture of basic practical and economic concerns.

In the early stages of development of the embryonic advertising industry, the dominant school of thought was based around essential principles of rationality and derived, in the main, from economic theory. From this (in retrospect) somewhat naive rational perspective, advertisements were viewed simply as an informational tool for the consumer. As described by David Schumann, Curtis P. Haugtvedt, and Edith Davidson, the consumer was thought to be making a series of rational decisions with regard to consumption, and it was thought that they would be unwilling to make a particular purchase unless the product satisfied their expectations of quality and value. Hence, if these expectations were in any way not fulfilled, then, as a rational processor of information, the consumer simply would not buy the product. However, by 1910, a second and different school of thought with roots more firmly in the new emerging science of psychology was starting to emerge, to later become the advertising industry's dominant theory. Rather than focusing exclusively on principles of rationality, the focus of this new perspective lay much more on the “nonrational” side of the human character, where it was believed that the “emotions of the public could be manipulated and that people could actually be persuaded to purchase [Page 1167]goods” (2008, 5). It is possible to argue that this transition from one psychological set of understandings of the essential nature of man (and woman) as consumer to another was really set in motion with the first systematic application of psychological principles to the field of advertising in the work of Harlow Gale in 1900 and Walter Dill Scott in 1903. Following the mentalist (or in modern parlance “human information processing” or “cognitive psychological”) approach of their eminent teacher (and indeed the founder of the first psychological laboratory), Wilhelm Wundt, Gale pioneered the investigation of the ways in which advertisements impact readers' attention, and this work was followed shortly afterward by that of Scott, who wrote a number of articles on the psychological aspects of advertising, which applied mentalist concepts, such as attention, suggestion, and emotion, to the world of advertising. Over the next few decades, however, this mentalist approach was to be challenged by the emerging behaviorist perspective, which explicitly rejected the influence of inner processes in psychological theorizing (following the behaviorist tradition of a reductionist stimulus-response approach to explaining behavior) and instead claimed that actual purchasing behavior was the only real indicator of advertisement effectiveness and thus the only relevant variable for the science of advertising. Eventually, the relative advantages and disadvantages of both the mentalist approach and the behaviorist approach set the climate for the emergence of dynamicism in which the stimulus-response model evolved into the stimulus-organism-response model. From this point onward, the motivations, drives, and needs of the consumer that guide his or her behavior became the center point of much of consumer psychology, and this was linked into both the cognitive processing and the emotional processing of products, brands, and advertisements.

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