For many years, marketers have considered the customer as the most important aspect and structured all activities to ensure his satisfaction. This is an idea that is quickly becoming more popular and important in the present market environment. Competition has become ever greater and the market is becoming more characterized by similar products. The challenge that many marketers have to deal with is to have a clear understanding of the diversity that accompanies behaviour of consumers and provide goods and services that are in accordance to this. This is because digital tools provide marketers with the chance to not only collect but to also analyze data that has become even more complex on the purchasing patterns that consumers adopt. This paper therefore examines how the exchange between consumers and marketers has become highly dynamic, interactive and participative.
Consumer Behaviour
The subject of what causes consumers to behave as they do is one that has attracted a number of researchers. Going back as far as 300 years ago, economists such as Nicholas Bernoulli and John von Neumann began to analyze what exactly forms the background for the decisions made by consumers. Their work largely focused on the action of buying and was driven by utility theory(Knight & Weedon, 2009). This theory argues that consumers often make the choices that they do based on the outcomes that they expect to get out of these decisions(Boulding et al, 2005). Consumers are therefore considered as rational when it comes to decision making and only concerned with their own interests. However, while utility theory sees the consumer as rational, modern research on the topic of consumer behaviour examines a complex number of factors that have an impact on the consumer(Royle & Laing, 2013).
It also agrees that there are a number of activities in terms of consumption that go far beyond