Consumer Behavior | Letter To The Editor | Pune Mirror

Hi Joshua Varghese:

This has reference to your article entitled “Consumer behavior: From the world of wheels and screens” in today’s Pune Mirror.

With reference to your line “This is a subtle nod to the fact that they are monitoring consumer behaviour”, there’s nothing subtle – or new – about this practice.

American companies have made no secret of their heavy use of consumer behavior for ages. In fact, when I did MBA 35 years ago, Consumer Behavior was a part of the curriculum. I remember my textbook was full of examples of breakthrough American brands that owed their success to astute monitoring and exploitation of consumer behavior. Levi’s Dockers was one such brand, which created cotton pants in response to consumer behavior studies that found that youngish people in the 27-35 age bracket felt that they’d outgrown blue jeans and wanted something that was not made out of denim but was still not formal.

JFYI, this article 29 Psychological Tricks To Make You Buy More describes tons of psychological tricks derived from consumer behavior studies that are leveraged by marketers through the decades. Amazon’s 1-Click Shopping, Facebook’s addiction, Uber’s gamification, OTA’s “Book now, only 3 seats left!”, ChatGPT’s sycophancy – these are all cited as examples of putting consumer behavior lessons to work in everyday products and services. In relatively young capitalisms like India, marketing is not very sophisticated, and some of these practices are perceived as “Dark Patterns” by the common man / woman.

While monitoring of consumer behavior has spread to marketing all over the world by now, USA arguably still leads the world in this practice.

Hope you find this useful.