The Behavioral Ecology of Consumer Choice: How and What Do Consumers Maximize?

Although marketing researchers appreciate the significance of branding, they have only a partial understanding of how consumers react to and work with brands in the choices they make from day to day. Aggregate analyses of consumer brand choice show that comparatively few consumers of a product category are 100% loyal to any particular brand. Although each brand in the category attracts some “sole purchasers”, most buyers practice multi-brand purchasing, selecting from within a small repertoire or subset of tried and trusted brands (Ehrenberg, 1988). However, marketing research lacks an explanation of the underlying choice mechanisms in the individual consumer that may account for patterns of brand purchasing. Here the authors seek answers from evolutionary psychology, notably behavioral ecology, and from behavior analysis, notably matching studies of choice.