Consumer Behavior.

Narula, Anupam

Consumer Behavior, Karen Webb, Tata McGraw Hill Education Private Limited, New Delhi, 2011, Pages 241, price Rs. 399.

The second edition of Consumer Behaviour by Karen Webb is a practical text exploring the individual, social and lifestyle influences on consumer motivation and using this information to help assess and devise marketing strategies.

The Book has been written in a clear and concise manner, with real-life marketing examples in each chapter. The chapters are very concise and contain only the key theoretical concepts.

The broad areas covered in the book are:

* Consumer decision making process

* Organizational buying behavior

* Consumer psychology-influences on perception, learning, personality, motivation and attitudes.

* The influence of lifestyle and social class on buying behavior.

* The situational factors in the environment that influence Decision making

* The changing buying environment.

* Online buying situations.

The book is written specifically for undergraduate Management students and structured as per the requirements of beginners who are interested to learn buyer psychology. This new edition includes chapters on social marketing and growing importance of online buying aspects in marketing as well as illustrations and exhibits.

The book also features a new 'Marketing in Focus' component that gives a concise overview of mainly Australian topical cases at the beginning of each chapter. Each chapter also contains a summary, key terms and review questions.

Other comments are:

* Though the book covers 'Marketing in Focus" component in the beginning vignette but the cases at the end of each chapter are not there to enhance the critical thinking skills and ability to apply theoretical concepts to real world marketing strategies.

* The book covers the consumer as an individual, focuses on the social and lifestyle dimensions but influence of culture and cross culture on consumer behavior is brief and after sales and related issues have not been covered.

* The book highlights extensively on Australian marketing context and concise cases, whereas in order to enable students of world markets to connect consumer behavior with the application, its approach should be global.

* Overall the book is recommended to understand the Australian consumer buying behavior and is good for undergraduate Management students.

Anupam Narula

Associate Professor

FORE School of Management