Consumer Behavior, Marketing and the “Why” of Consumption

Posted on July 1, 2025 in Blog

There are many resources that track what consumers buy; check any company’s earnings report or the latest retail sales data. Understanding consumer behavior focuses instead on why individuals, groups, or businesses make purchasing decisions. Effective marketing appeals to the myriad psychological, sociological, and economic factors that influence consumer behavior in both the short and long term.

This is your crash course in the theory of consumer behavior; the exam is the rest of your marketing life.

What Is Consumer Behavior?

Consumer behavior is the ongoing study of how consumers choose what to buy, what influences their decision-making, and why one option is preferred over another. It’s a field that combines academic elements of psychology, sociology, economics, and anthropology, plus a not small number of subjective assumptions.

Understanding consumer behaviors is crucial for effective marketing. It’s essentially the study of why your customers or clients do what they do – and what they don’t do. Fortunately, you don’t need a master’s in psychology to gather actionable consumer behavior insights.

Why Consumer Behavior Is Important

Understanding broader consumer behavior trends and market-specific realities will improve performance on any marketing channel.

Improve marketing strategy: Knowing what motivates your customer impacts which channels are the most effective, shapes content and messaging, and influences details like promotional pricing and packaging.

Identify needs: Monitoring shifting consumer spending patterns or feedback often leads to the development of new products or services.

Create segments: Brands often segment customers based on shared characteristics; how, where, and why they purchase goods or services is an effective way to categorize like audiences and improve messaging.

Align brand strategy: Understanding consumer behavior allows for more effective brand alignment, especially in rapidly changing (or growing) markets.

How Marketing Influences Consumer Behavior

Marketing doesn’t change consumer behavior; it identifies past, present, and emerging consumer trends and connects the dots. In many ways, marketing accelerates existing behaviors that already have momentum, but focuses them in the direction of a particular brand.

Awareness: Most marketing campaigns (not to mention the goods and services they sell) start by solving a problem. They identify not just a situation (ex. slow internet), but the barrier and emotion it causes (ex. low productivity, frustration).

Solution: Marketers solve the problem with a product or service and communicate the unique features or benefits their “widget” offers. This is a value proposition, and it’s usually described as somehow different from other options on the market.

Branding: Marketing reflects a brand’s values, differentiates its products, and makes a strong emotional appeal to potential customers.

Decision-making: Awareness and branding encourage customers to buy. Marketing at the point of sale (in person, online, even in sales meetings) provides the detailed, differentiating information and specific pricing customers need to complete the sale. There are many tactics that play on the emotions of consumers (scarcity, urgency, exclusivity), some of which may attract or alienate prospects, depending on their customer profile.

It’s almost impossible to ignore consumer behavior in marketing. It’s the root of everything we do.

Conducting Your Own Consumer Behavior Analysis

Research should be a part of your ongoing marketing operations; if it’s not, tag in someone who can help. To get a comprehensive view of emerging consumer behavior trends, start at the macro level and narrow your view to your core customers.

Monthly Retail Sales Data – The US Census Bureau releases a monthly retail sales report that includes aggregated data for US retail and food service sales. This offers a broad-scale view of consumer spending as well as industry-specific data, including retail trade, non-store retailers, and food service sales. Advanced reports are released monthly, with revisions completed 30 days later.

Consumer Sentiment Survey – The University of Michigan runs a monthly consumer sentiment survey that collects soft data from thousands of US households. The survey results form an index of consumer sentiment, measured on a scale ranging from 40 (negative sentiment) to 120 (positive sentiment). Positive sentiment indicates consumers believe their personal household finances, employment, pricing, and other factors are in good shape.

A similar but separate survey, the Consumer Confidence Index (CCI), is also an excellent tool for gauging the day’s current sentiment.

Industry Growth Reports – Looking a little closer to home, the Bureau of Labor Statistics operates a quarterly growth project dataset that features forecasts for production, employment, and other statistics by industry. This helps businesses put their own growth into a broader context and may identify opportunities in adjacent industries and markets.

Understanding Your Customers

But how do you monitor and explain consumer behavior in your own business operations? There are several tools for collecting this type of data, and your digital platforms are incredibly valuable.

Google Analytics – Website data is a wealth of information on consumer behavior, particularly for learning what content and messaging appeals to users. Top-performing landing pages, in-demand products, and successful promotions offer invaluable insights into what your customers want. It’s on your team to find out why – we’ll get to that!

Google Search Console – Look at how your brand is represented on the search engine results page (SERP) to see which pages on your site are getting seen and which drive clicks. Declining branded and non-branded impressions may indicate a reduction in demand for your product or service. Seasonality aside, dig into whether consumers are looking at new alternatives or shifting spending to other categories, especially in times of economic uncertainty.

Social Media – Followers, engagement, and brand mentions indicate a stronger connection. Social listening, or monitoring comments and posts about your brand, can reveal genuine responses to pricing, competitive positioning, and brand loyalty.

Over the past several years, brands have leveraged the impact of social media influencers on consumer behavior to shape awareness, consideration, and conversion. The approach uses the established authority of trust of influencers within their communities to build trust with the contracted brand. If you work with influencers, we recommend using a platform that makes it easy to measure their impact for your brand to accurately track ROI and marketing efficiency.

Why Don’t You Just Ask Them?

The most direct way to learn more about your customers is to, well, ask them. Market research takes many shapes, though customer surveys offer the most personalized way to collect data.

Conduct surveys, track how easy your website and related tools are to use, and follow up after conversion to learn why your customers chose that product. We have a handy piece on creating a data-driven customer experience that will generate more insight into their behaviors, too.

Discover Their “Why” with Oneupweb

From accurate, reliable data collection and analysis to insightful market research, Oneupweb is your full-service marketing agency. When you choose us, you get access to a hand-picked team of strategists, SEOs, writers, designers, and developers with deep experience in your vertical. Get it all – research, strategy, and delivery – all from an agency that promises to be your favorite meeting of the week. Get in touch or call (231) 922-9977 today to get started.