ABSTRACT

My interest in climate, culture, and consumption began with my first book, The Theory of Buyer Behavior (with John A. Howard), published in 1969. It took more than seven years of research and synthesis to answer the question of how consumers make brand choices for such daily necessities as toothpaste, detergents, and cereals. Contrary to the prevailing wisdom that consumers calculate utility of different brands (albeit in a subjective manner) and select the brand with the highest utility, my co-author and I believed that consumers actually do not make choices. Instead, they reduce choices by learning through experiences in the course of time and/or by early socialization of products and brands from their family, culture, and peer groups. In other words, consumers become loyal to a brand by habit. Furthermore, despite myriad choices (brands, packages, flavors, size, etc.), they actually consider only a handful of brands with specific size, flavor, and packaging. We called this the “evoked set.” Of course, it varies from consumer to consumer. However, a company cannot succeed in the marketplace no matter how good the product or offering unless it occupies a place in the consumer’s evoked set and becomes a preferred brand. The important role of culture in determining consumers’ preferences in daily necessities such as food, shelter, and clothing was even more obvious to me given that I came to the United States from India to do my graduate studies with very different culturally anchored prior preferences and habits. I had to learn (actually unlearn and relearn) about new brands in familiar product categories such as toothpaste and rice as well as new product categories such as canned soups and detergents. Indeed, my doctoral dissertation investigated how adult immigrants to the United States learn about new brands for known product categories as well as find out about altogether new product categories for which they had no prior culturally anchored experiences and preferences (Sheth 1966). The dissertation research was also an empirical testing of the Howard–Sheth Theory of Buyer Behavior (1969), which focused on how consumers become brand-loyal through three stages of learning—that is, from extensive problem solving to limited problem solving and finally to automatic response behavior.