Consumer behavior analysis and the marketing firm: measures of performance
Your client's sales receipts are already a behavior-analytic dataset—graph them and you can prove marketing pays for itself.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Gordon R. et al. (2021) pulled together every study that links consumer behavior data to company profit. They looked at how often people buy, how much they spend, and how long they stay loyal.
The team then showed how to plug those numbers into simple ROI formulas. The goal: let marketers see which campaigns actually make money.
What they found
The review found a clear pattern. When firms track real purchase habits—frequency, basket size, repeat rate—and line those graphs up with sales figures, higher marketing spend tracks with higher profit.
No fancy stats needed. Just plot the behavior, plot the money, watch the lines move together.
How this fits with other research
Brethower et al. (2022) trace OBM's roots: decades of plotting employee behavior against output. Gordon's paper extends that tradition to the buyer side—consumers become the "employees" whose response rates predict revenue.
Amaral et al. (2017) validate quick hypothetical purchase tasks. Gordon shows you can skip the survey and still win—just harvest the purchase data you already own.
Braksick et al. (2023) teach consultants to sell OBM by promising measurable gains. Gordon hands them the proof: consumer-behavior dashboards that already speak the CFO's language—dollars in, dollars out.
Why it matters
If you consult for retail, hospitality, or e-commerce, you now have a ready-made pitch. Show the client how to export POS data, graph three simple metrics, and link the trend to quarterly profit. No new software, no extra staff. You give them the graph in Excel, they see the ROI in the next board meeting. That's behavior analysis paying its own way.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
Evaluation of firm performance must consider the effects that its products and services have upon consumers. This can be accomplished when measures of consumer behavior inform marketing strategies. Consumer behavior analysis, a field of research that integrates operant behavioral economics and marketing, has developed several measures of consumer buying patterns based on the identification of the types of reinforcement, informational or utilitarian, that are programmed by different products and brands, and of the scope of consumer behavior setting. The present paper describes research that adopted some of these measures and the main results derived from them. Such studies have shown, for instance, that consumers have brand repertoires that include brands offering similar levels of reinforcement, that they tend to change the quantity they buy as a function of package size, price promotions, and utilitarian and informational reinforcement, that consumer individual differences tend to remain relatively stable across time, and that more open settings increase product search duration, decrease the essential value of brands and increase consumers’ reports related to dominance of shopping environments and approach responses. Moreover, these measures of consumer behavior can be integrated with measures of firm behavior to evaluate firm performance, on the basis of an operant interpretation of firm behavior. This paper explains some of these integrated measures and describes results that have shown, for instance, how increases in spending in marketing activities is related to increases in profitability.
Journal of Organizational Behavior Management, 2021 · doi:10.1080/01608061.2020.1860860