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Report Information from ProQuestDecember 03 2014
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Document 1 of 1 The Elusive Consumer: Searching for Consumer
Attitudes and Behavior Author: Ojala, Marydee ProQuest document
link Abstract: Businesses only survive if they both keep existing
customers and attract new ones. This is particularlytrue in the B2C
market, where individual consumers wield more power today than ever
before. Widelypublicized encounters with customer service
representatives gone badly wrong testify to the power of
theconsumer. Comcast would probably like to forget about the audio
clip of its pushy customer service guycontinuously asking the
customer who'd like to disconnect why he didn't want the service.
ProQuest'sABI/INFORM database probably has the most consistent set
of index terms in its thesaurus. Most index phrasesrelevant to
researching the elusive consumer start with the singular form of
the word "consumer," includingConsumer advertising, Consumer
attitudes, Consumer behavior, Consumer products, and Consumer
research.Web search engines are an obvious place to look for
consumer information. Full text: Headnote Trying to get inside the
mind of consumers to predict what they will buy is hardly a new
business activity, butwith greater choices available, it is ever
more critical to business success. Businesses only survive if they
both keep existing customers and attract new ones. This is
particularly true inthe B2C market, where individual consumers
wield more power today than ever before. Widely
publicizedencounters with customer service representatives gone
badly wrong testify to the power of the consumer.Comcast would
probably like to forget about the audio clip of its pushy customer
service guy continuouslyasking the customer who'd like to
disconnect why he didn't want the service
(soundcloud.com/ryan-block-10/comcastic-ser vice). And United
Airlines was unprepared for the continuing interest in United
Breaks Guitars,released in 2009 and now with more than 14 million
views on YouTube (youtube.com/watch?v=5YGc4zOqozo).Dissatisfied
customers have, via the internet, a platform to vent their
complaints that reaches a much wideraudience than in pre-internet
times. Companies would rather concentrate on the positives rather
than the negatives. They would rather figure outwhat appeals to
customers rather than dwell on criticisms. Trying to get inside the
mind of consumers to predictwhat they will buy is hardly a new
business activity, but with greater choices available, it is ever
more critical tobusiness success. While the internet and social
media provide means for unhappy customers to complain, theycan also
be fertile areas of research into consumer attitudes and behavior.
Research questions are rarely asgeneral as, "Tell me what I need to
do to make customers buy my product." They are likely to be more
specific:"What are the brand preferences of specific demographics
of customers?" "How does having a family affectconsumer choice?"
"Do environmental attitudes share consumer behavior?" "How do
consumer attitudes differfrom one country to another?"
Traditionally, business researchers would turn to the standard
business databases for consumer insights. Thesedatabases remain
good choices, particularly because of the extensive indexing and
thesaurus terms that havebeen crafted during the past few decades.
This does not mean that the indexing is standardized across
thedatabases. In fact, it's sometimes not particularly standardized
even within a database. BUSINESS DATABASES ProQuest's ABI/INFORM
database probably has the most consistent set of index terms in its
thesaurus. Mostindex phrases relevant to researching the elusive
consumer start with the singular form of the word
"consumer,"including Consumer advertising, Consumer attitudes,
Consumer behavior, Consumer products, and Consumerresearch. For the
more general searches, ABI/INFORM goes to the plural form,
"Consumers," as a stand-aloneterm. Combine this with a product,
service, or other concept to answer specific questions, such as
what
http://search.proquest.com/docview/1626508416?accountid=61315
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consumers are looking for when making a car-buying decision or
why people are motivated to save forretirement Recent news from
ProQuest brags about adding 461 titles in the last 18 months to
ABI/ INFORM, half of whichare peerreviewed, full-text journals.
Additionally, the database has added 25 conference
proceedings/workingpapers, 122 trade publications, 13 newsfeeds,
and 60 market research reports. Of particular interest toconsumer
research is the inclusion of some 160,000 working papers from SSRN,
which are now amplified by 10new working papers series for the
OECD. EBSCO's Business Source Premier has a plethora of index
terms. You can search for Consumer activism,Consumer behavior,
Consumer panels, Consumer protection, and Consumer profiling. Given
those terms, you'dthink you could also search for Consumer
preferences. You'd be wrong. The subject term for that is
Consumers'preferences. Is there a difference between Consumer
behavior and Consumers' preferences? Yes, a search forConsumers'
preferences NOT Consumer behavior yields 16,666hits. Moving on to
attitudes, given that EBSCO offers up Consumer behavior, you'd
think, for the sake ofconsistency, that you could also search for
the term Consumer attitudes. Wrong again. It's Consumers
-attitudes. It's these types of inconsistencies that drive
information professionals crazy and cause students todistrust the
helpful advice of their local librarians to use database thesauri.
Need to know about particular types of consumers? EBSCO provides an
overabundance of terms. There areAffluent consumers, Low-income
consumers, Minority consumers, Ethnic consumers,
Asian-Americanconsumers, Hispanic-American consumers, and Young
consumers, among others. If you're researching car-buying behavior
or retirement savings motivation, you can, at least theoretically,
distinguish between affluentand low-income preferences and among
different ethnicities. This only works, of course, if someone has
writtenabout those subsets of consumers. In contrast to the surfeit
of indexing on Business Source Premier, Factiva's terms are
somewhat sparse. It hasConsumer sentiment, Consumer affairs,
Consumer product reviews, and Market research/Consumer
trends.Subject terms on LexisNexis are more general because, unlike
the business databases such as ABI/INFORM,Business Source Premier,
and Factiva, LexisNexis covers a great deal more than business.
Thus, it does havethe term Consumer behavior, but it also has
Behavior &cognition. When searching for consumer behavior,
it'sfrequently a good idea to OR the two terms. Better yet, ignore
the index terms and use free-text keywordsinstead. OUTSIDE THE
BUSINESS DATABASE BOX Much of what happens in the mind of a
consumer or a potential customer is rooted in psychology. The
databasepsycINFO contains a surprisingly robust set of consumer,
marketing, management, and human resourcesinformation. The American
Psychological Association (APA), producer of psycINFO, views the
database asmultidisciplinary, concentrating on people over things
and including all human behavior. Consumers are nothingif not
people, so it's actually a good source for determining attitudes,
behaviors, and preferences. It hasthesaurus terms and
classification codes that are quite detailed. Terms are first
applied automatically bymachine but are then checked by APA staff.
In the APA thesaurus, you will find Consumer attitudes, Consumer
behavior, Consumer research, Consumersatisfaction, and Consumer
surveys. Questions about consumer preference can frequently involve
brandawareness, and psycINFO provides the term Brand preferences to
cover this. Classification codes of particularinterest to consumer
research are 3900 for Consumer psychology and 3920 for Consumer
attitudes &behavior.Note that psycINFO lumps attitude and
behavior together while the business databases consider them to
beseparate ideas. Since psycINFO is loaded onto EBSCOhost, Ovid,
and ProQuest as well as being available onthe APA platform, search
functionality varies slightly among the four platforms. Sometimes
relevant terms can be a bit of a surprise. Take the question about
what triggers people to save forretirement-useful information for
financial planners, banks, and investment firms that want to
encourage
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consumers to use their services and open retirement accounts. A
possible search strategy is (Reti rement ORSaving) AND (Delay
discounting OR Time perspective). Another nonbusiness place to
search for the elusive consumer is Web of Science (WoS). Don't let
the wordScience throw you off; the social sciences are also
represented. I found articles about motivations for
retirementsavings in journals such as Harvard Journal of
Legislation, Journal of Aging and Social Policy,
EducationalGerontology, and Zeitschrift fur Gerontologie und
Geriatrie, while an excellent article on car-buying behaviorpopped
up in the International Journal of Sustainable Transportation. WoS
has no thesaurus, so searches are entirely free text. Using the OR
connector and truncation is a goodidea, as this is not a full-text
database. One example is (consumer* OR cus tomer*) AND (behavior
ORbehaviour OR attitude* OR preference*) AND (car OR a u t o m o b
i l e * ) for the car-buying question. THE WEB AND SOCIAL MEDIA Web
search engines are an obvious place to look for consumer
information. A search engine is probably thefirst place most people
go, even though I've not put it first in this column. As with WoS,
Google, Bing, and theirilk don't use controlled vocabulary. It's up
to the creativity of the searcher to construct search strategies
that willilluminate the intricacies of those elusive consumer
beliefs and actions. Of particular interest is the file type
limiter. Since web search engines are reliant upon advertising to
beprofitable, you will frequently get results geared toward buying
products. Instead of finding information aboutconsumers, you are
considered to be the consumer. Limiting your search to fi
Letype:pdf will frequently returnwhite papers, journal articles,
and other formal documents. You can also limit your search to
presentations onconsumer issues. The syntaxis f i L e ty pe : ppt
OR f i L etype : pptx.Not only will you find presentations
fromconferences, but also university course material. For searches
on consumer topics, consider Google Scholar(scholar.google.com) or
Microsoft Academic (academic.research.microsoft.com). Social media
is famous for opinions. Companies can track what people are saying
about their products to gleaninformation about consumer preferences
and attitudes. Twitter's advanced search option
(twitter.com/search-advanced) allows for searches by sentiment,
based on emoticons used in tweets. You can search for tweetsTwitter
thinks are positive (smiley face), negative (frowny face),
questions (question mark), or include retweets.This is only an
indication, not an exact science, as people may use smiley or
frowny faces in a satirical or ironicmanner. However, if enough
people use a smiley face when tweeting about a product, it's worth
noticing thatthe sentiment is positive-or worrying if it's
negative. CONSUMER CONFIDENCE The Consumer Confidence Index, which
measures household spending trends, has long been conducted by
theUniversity of Michigan's Institute for Social Research. Under a
contract with Thomson Reuters, survey resultswere released
exclusively to that company, which then sold early access to its
customers. Although not illegal,the practice came to be viewed with
suspicion and invited regulatory scrutiny. As of January 2015,
coinciding with the expiration of the contract, this will no longer
happen. Instead,Bloomberg LP, under the terms of a 5-year contract,
will be responsible for distributing the monthly report. It willput
the latest numbers out as a news story, and the University will
simultaneously release the figures on itswebsite. Bloomberg will
not charge investors a fee to see advance copies of the survey. The
Index numbers are widely reported, so you are not limited to
Bloomberg. News stories will appear insubscription sources such as
Factiva and LexisNexis but will also be evident through the news
databases ofGoogle and Bing and via dedicated news search engines
such NewsNow (newsnow, co.uk). ELUSIVE CONSUMERS Answering the
eternal questions about what consumers want-and will pay for-will
never have an absolute, fixed-instone response. As times change, so
do perceptions and purchasing decisions. Thus, the need for
consumerresearch will always be with us, although sources and
strategies may change. AuthorAffiliation
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Marydee Ojala ([email protected]) is editor-in-chief of
Online Searcher;. Subject: Consumer behavior; Consumer attitudes;
Online data bases; Searches; Location: United States--US
Classification: 9190: United States; 5200: Communications &
information management Publication title: Online Searcher Volume:
38 Issue: 6 Pages: 71-73 Number of pages: 3 Publication year: 2014
Publication date: Nov/Dec 2014 Year: 2014 Section: the dollar sign
Publisher: Information Today, Inc. Place of publication: Medford
Country of publication: United States Publication subject:
Computers--Data Base Management, Computers--Internet ISSN: 23249684
Source type: Trade Journals Language of publication: English
Document type: Feature ProQuest document ID: 1626508416 Document
URL: http://search.proquest.com/docview/1626508416?accountid=61315
Copyright: Copyright Information Today, Inc. Nov/Dec 2014 Last
updated: 2014-11-21 Database: ProQuest Education Journals,ProQuest
Computing,ProQuest Research Library
http://search.proquest.com/docview/1626508416?accountid=61315
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BibliographyCitation style: Harvard - British Standard
OJALA, M., 2014. The Elusive Consumer: Searching for Consumer
Attitudes and Behavior. Online Searcher,38(6), pp. 71-73.
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