Practical Implications in Popular Consumer Behaviour Research

Abstract

Despite the frequent calls to bridge the academic-practitioner divide by making academic research easily comprehensible to practitioners, there are minimal discernible advances in this direction. The objective of this study is to identify the popular trends in academic research and establish the relevance of scholarly works for managerial action. The study initially scrutinises the prominent topics in consumer behaviour between 2005-2016 using subject terms and the Google Scholar (GS) ranking of the reviewed papers. Following which, correspondence analysis is carried out on the themes to check correlation, and then validated using content analysis. A total of 149 research articles with managerial implications on the prominent topics were considered. The themes that emerged were: marketing communication tools (advertising and promotion); influencing strategies (pricing, selling and product offering); and customer reactions (loyalty and satisfaction). The implications common to the themes are consolidated and presented in a way that could act as a quick reference guide for practitioners. The review, though being limited to studies published in top-tier marketing journals, is unique in that no other paper has previously focused exclusively on listing the academic findings of practical relevance that could aid managers in decision-making.