Recording One (16-18)
(16)Well, my current research is really about consumer behavior.So recently, I’ve looked at young people’s drinking and it’s obviously a major concern to government at the moment. I’ve also looked at how older people are represented in the media. Again, it’s of major current interest with older people becoming a much larger proportion of UK, and indeed, world society. I’m also interested in how consumers operate online and how that online behavior might be different from how they operate offline when they go to the shops. Well, I think that the important thing here is to actually understand what’s happening from the consumers’ perspective. One of the things that businesses and indeed government organizations often fail to do is to really see what is happening from the consumers’ perspective. (17)For example, in the case of young people’s drinking, one of the things that I’ve identified is that drinking for people, say, between the age of 18 and 24 is all about the social activity.A lot of the government advertising has been about individual responsibility, but actually understanding that drinking is very much about the social activity and finding ways to help young people get home safely and not end up in hospital is one of the things that we’ve tried to present there. The key thing about consumer behaviour is that it’s very much about how consumers change. Markets always change faster than marketing, so we have to look at what consumers are doing. Currently I teach consumer behaviour to undergraduates in their second year, and we look at all kinds of things in consumer behaviour and particularly how consumers are presented in advertising. So they get involved by looking at advertising and really critically assessing the consumer behaviour aspects of it and getting involved, sometimes doing primary research. (18)For example, last year my students spent a week looking at their own purchasing and analyzed it in detail from shopping to the relationship that they have with their retail banks and their mobile phone providers.I think they found it very useful and it also helped them identify just what kind of budgets they had too. The fact of the matter is that there is a whole range of interesting research out there. And I think as the years go on, there is going to be much more for us to consider and certainly much more for students to become involved in.
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