amj Australasian Marketing Journal - ANZMAC

ularly in a text that gave so much attention to measures.
A number of other omissions troubled me. The brand, product
and customer perspectives needed to be betteranalysed. For
example, brand loyalty was adequately treated but customer
loyalty was not explained except for the Dick and Basu
(1994) model in the slides (under brand loyalty). This omission
reflected the lack of detailed consideration of issues
stemming from the relationship marketing perspective.
Customer retention is much talked about in industry, usually
with a genuflection toward Reichheld (1996), and this
suggests to me that the matter needs more comment in a text
of this sort. Another omission was planned behaviour theory
(Ajzen 1991). The text dealt with its predecessor (reasoned
action) and the more esoteric theory of trying; it should have
focused on the widely used and up-to-date theory of planned
behaviour and given examples of its application. And what
about the mathematical approaches? Despite the extensive
treatment of diffusion there was no mention of the Bass
model; similarly the Dirichlet was not discussed in the text
though it appeared briefly in a case where the purchase incidence
and brand choice of Japanese consumers is discussed.
Supporting material
The PowerPoint slides (prepared by Jennifer Thornton) were
admirably clear and mostly avoided the distracting clip art
and transition effects that are often used to excess in this
medium. Some of the slides were a bit busy but there was
nothing to stop a lecturer from adapting them. In general, they
summarised the corresponding chapter and sometimes introduced
a slightly different slant when compared with the book.
However, there was little animation, no hyperlinking to the
Internet or jumping to software, and no use of sound or video.
I think that the more exotic features of PowerPoint are now
more widely used and there is a real opportunity to introduce
TV advertising, interviews and other dynamic material into
PowerPoint. Traditional publishers need to give more thought
to this since these additions will aid learning and sell texts.
And academics with particular expertise need to provide
video clips that can be used. I found the instructor s manual
less useful than the PowerPoint slides. Much of the manual
seemed to summarise the corresponding chapter and there
was no need for this. Most lecturers find that undergraduates
are reluctant to talk and ideas for practical activities are a
boon; these were provided in the textbook and the additional
suggestions in the instructor s manual added little.
Overall assessment
This book meets the requirements of lecturers who share the
partly implicit assumptions of the authors that the subject is a
continuation of marketing into social science and that a textbook
should lay out related ideas, mainly from psychology
and sociology, in a clear, descriptive and relatively uncritical
manner. This is the widely accepted formula for consumer
behaviour, which has evolved from foundation courses in
Book Reviews
pure psychology and social science. This treatment works
quite well for sociological work but rather less well for
psychology, which needs to be given a more hypotheticodeductive,
theory-driven introduction. However, I do not
think that this widely accepted view of consumer behaviour is
sufficiently critical or demanding when the subject is taught
as an end-of-course elective; then, I believe that there is merit
in an alternative approach that starts with the marketing problem
and makes more direct use of academic research in
marketing.
An alternative approach
Marketing is a prescriptive discipline, like medicine or education.
It must have a praxis, a body of do s and don ts covering
positioning, segmentation, promotional spending etc and textbooks
in marketing must meet this requirement. But, like
medicine or education, there is a concurrent requirement to
research the applications and integrate any findings into the
curriculum. Marketing researchers do this but their work
seems to be poorly used in undergraduate and MBA teaching.
I see consumer behaviour as an evidence-based subject that
uses this research and explains how consumers respond to
marketing interventions. We should start with problems in
marketing and follow these through, drawing on any social
science or mathematical methods that help with the solution.
Most textbooks in consumer behaviour do not do this. The
way they cite papers illustrates their approach. A quick check
of post-1997 texts shows that, with the honourable exception
of Kardes (1998), consumer behaviour textbooks use the
convention of removing references from the body of the text
and putting them in a Notes section at the end of the chapter
or book. This ensures that they are mostly not read and cannot
be integrated into the argument. This practice may work for
company reports but I have never seen any justification for it
in textbooks. Removal of references from the text is a device
for dumbing down. Unless the study is cited properly, it is
difficult to discuss it in any detail and relate it to other studies.
As a result, conclusions are stated and the alternative
possibilities that attend any research or practice, which
provide the basis for progress, are omitted. It is true that the
books that use the references in text approach are harder but,
if we take bright students into business courses, we have an
obligation to make intellectual demands on them. The
demands that we make should be commensurate with those
that are made in other subjects such as economics and
psychology.
A second advantage of this approach is that much of the
curriculum that is found in the standard textbooks can be
dropped or can be taught in the first year as a social science
course. Marketers do not use Maslow or Hertzberg, and they
do not apply the extended box models that supposedly explain
consumer choice. Personality analyses are of little relevance
to practitioners. Similarly, Dichter and his psychoanalytic
interpretation of consumer behaviour can be abandoned.
Australasian Marketing Journal 9 (1), 2001 79