The Psychology of Consumer Behavior

13 Applications to Nonprofit Settings

In the previous chapters, most of the discussion and examples have revolved around commodity-type products. Consumers have been scrutinized as they drank cans of soda pop, ate Biggy Burgers, and bought used automobiles. This is legitimate insofar as the most common applications of the foregoing concepts and principles are found in private sector (i.e., profit-oriented) settings. Certainly, the lion’s share of research and theory has developed with regard to private sector, commodity-type products. However, the introduction in chapter 1 suggested that the product that is used by consumers could be a school’s educational product, a religious group’s spiritual product, or something other than some physical object. ...