Design and Consumer Research

Consumer research, sometimes referred to as consumer psychology, is the study of processes involved when individuals or groups select, purchase, use, or dispose of products and services in order to satisfy needs and desires.It goes beyond "buyer behavior," which focuses primarily on the interaction and processes between buyer and seller during an exchange, to encompass how experience with a product affects our lives, as well as how possessions influence the way we feel about ourselves.Consumer research draws on work from a diverse range of fieldsmarketing, psychology, economics, cultural anthropology, and semiotics, to name just a few.The discipline of consumer research is well suited for the study of a number of productdesign-related issues in that it offers a unique perspective and combination of research methods, along with a tangible research context.This consumer-product context (as opposed to an art criticism or philosophy context) is extremely helpful for investigating design and aesthetics questions because it allows fundamental, seemingly philosophical questions to be recast in a more concrete form.Within the discipline, there is the recognition that choice, purchase, and consumption behaviors are extremely complex, and quite often people do not posses a great deal of insight concerning their own behaviors.That is, the reasons for our behavior as consumers of products (and services) are not always clear and can be difficult to predict or explain.Even so, a fundamental tenet of this field is that while there is variation in the behaviors that are observed across consumers (for example, different consumers purchase different products), most consumer behavior is not simply random.Consumer behavior is motivated or serves as a means to an end (even if the "end" is solely hedonic in nature), involves complex decision processes, and is influenced by both internal and external factors.