Cognitive model and behavioural model are two of the most common approaches that have been using by the marketers to understand the consumer behaviour. Both approaches have their own supporters who are the theorists or marketers. However, there has been an argument that about which model describes the consumer behaviour the best existed in markets for decades. “Consumer behavior is widely understood as a problem-solving and decision-making sequence, the outcome of which is determined by the buyer's goal-directed processing of information.” (Foxall 1992, p384). Cognitive model describes the consumers go through a few processes that consist of a few steps to achieve their purchase decisions among some alternatives. Although cognitive model sounds make sense and persuasive, it does not really have empirical facts to prove that it really works in all the real market. However, cognitive model do exist in the real market world in some buying situations.

The main factor that affects the feasibility of cognitive model is the involvement of the consumer products. The higher the involvement of the product category, consumers are more willing to spend time for the decision making process. However, this does not mean general low involvement products will only suitable to describe as behavioural purchase. For example, when individuals buying a pen, they will make their purchase decision in behavioural way instead of cognitive way since the product is low involvement product and it occurs frequent in their life. However, for organisations who purchasing the same products, they might make their purchases in cognitive way by go through some information process and make decisions among some alternatives. This is because those products might be a high involvement product for them due to the larger purchases or different purpose of purchase such as for reselling or inventory. The purchase of individual might for their personal use but for household or organisations, the purchases might for a group of people and with multi-objectives.

Behaviourism is the alternative model of cognitive model. It tries to explain purchasing as a learning process. There are two major part of behaviourism which is classical conditioning and operant conditioning. Classical conditioning is known as passive learning Most of the purchases in our daily life are low involvement products. High involvement product purchasing does occur in our life but it is infrequent compare to our low involvement product. For example, we do not buy car or house frequently. However, different people define involvement differently. Some product might be highly involved in some people life but not in others life. In fact, consumers usually buy randomly, because they are not able and do not want to spend so much time to find out which is the best product. Different brands often try to tell all the consumers that they have what the others have and they even have more than what others offering. This causes confusion to consumers to decide which the best is and consumers decided to choose one of the best or any good enough products as long as it can achieve their basic requirement. In conclusion, there is no best model which can understand consumer behaviour and purchases the best. Different buying situations and conditions need different model to describe and examine.

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