To propose an offer in line with the expectations of a target public and know how to value it in a highly competitive environment, it is essential to know it well. It is to respond to this concern that research into the behavior of consumer. This science constitutes a relatively young discipline since it is at the beginning of the fifties in the united states that one can locate the first stammerings of its current form.
To meet such a challenge, the study of consumer behavior must have a broadly multidisciplinary approach. It must mobilize economic reflection, but also the social sciences such as psychology or sociology, or even quantitative disciplines such as mathematical modeling or applied statistics.
In this book, it has been deliberately decided to focus exclusively on the individual consumer. Organizational, professional or industrial purchases, even if they present a certain number of dimensions which are found in what we will be able to say, nevertheless have enough important specificities (purchasing centers, adequacy of the personal interests of the buyer and organizational of the company which employs him...) to be the subject of developments which must be specific to them.