Understanding the Consumer

Front Cover
SAGE Publications, Apr 3, 2003 - Business & Economics - 202 pages
Understanding the Consumer brings together marketing theory and practice in a truly consumer-centric approach. It challenges the lip service usually paid to this concept and demonstrates that a fundamental understanding of the consumer is critical to the future of effective marketing.

Drawing on cutting-edge developments in the literature it reconceptualizes how consumers respond and act in the marketplace with particular attention to:

- relationships with suppliers, products and brands

- their innovative, creative and resistant behaviour

- the complexity and unpredictability of their consumption behaviour

- their increasing need to get closer to production.

The book challenges existing functionally driven marketing thinking and shows how a more holistic approach to the marketplace will drive better theory and practice. It combines a jargon-free approach to the subject with an illustration of the relevant theory using practical, topical examples from the marketplace as well as drawing on other business related disciplines including sociology and economics to support its arguments.

From inside the book

Contents

The Consumeroriented Approach to Marketing
9
New Products and their Meanings
29
Paradoxes of Meaning
40
Copyright

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About the author (2003)

Isabelle Szmigin has published in a wide range of academic journals including Psychology and Marketing