Consumer Behavior Analysis and the Marketing Firm: Bilateral Contingency in the Context of Environmental Concern

Abstract

Consumer behavior analysis provides an operant understanding of consumption as the result of the scope of the consumer behavior setting and the pattern of reinforcement that maintains it. The theory of the marketing firm shows how organizations respond to consumer behavior by managing the consumer behavior setting scope and pattern of reinforcement. Environment-impacting consumption and corporate attempts to reverse its impact can therefore be understood in operant terms. The question remains how we can understand the relationship between a complex contextual system like a firm, the behavior of which is predictable and controllable by considering its emergent operant consequences, and the collective behaviors of consumers, each of whom is a contextual system responding uniquely to the peculiar pattern of contingencies that shapes and maintains its behavior. This article seeks the solution in terms of bilateral contingencies and seeks to relate these to issues arising from the theory of metacontingency and macrobehavior.

KEYWORDS:

• consumer behavior analysis
• marketing firm
• bilateral contingency
• metacontingency
• environmental despoliation

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This article was presented as “Consumer Behavior Analysis and Cultural Change in the Context of Environmental Conservation” at the Association for Behavior Analysis International Seminar on Leadership and Cultural Change, May 23–25, 2014, in Chicago, Illinois.

I am grateful to Kevin Vella for helpful comments on an earlier draft.

Notes

¹ While the marketing department or function is responsible for the technical devising and implementation of marketing mixes, these can be optimally directed toward the profitable fulfillment of customer requirements only in the context of a customer-oriented perspective that the marketing firm supplies. Therefore, this article refers to the provision of marketing mixes as a corporate-level responsibility of the marketing firm as a whole.

² The question of how an organization can be said to have a learning history requires an answer that goes beyond the limits of this article. An organization’s learning history might simply be that of its leader or leaders; it might be that of a dominant coalition within the firm or consist of the tacit and explicit knowledge base within the enterprise, the procedures to which its members’ behavior patterns conform, or the set of verbal behaviors and rules that govern its activities. For considerations that arise within behavior analysis, see Houmanfar, Rodrigues, and Smith (2009). The conceptualization at which this passage hints, however, is broader than these, consisting of an abstraction of learning processes that influence the entire conduct of the firm within its market place.

³ Relevant reviews to the ABA literature on environmental conservation include Foxall (1994, 2002a, 2002c, 2013) and Foxall et al. (2006). There are also excellent comprehensive reviews by Cone and Hayes (1980) and Geller, Winett, and Everett (1984). The present exposition summarizes the results of these reviews.