The consumer behavior has been developed through the times, according to economic, social, cultural and technological context it is inserted in. The authors that have written about this theme reflect its evolution and their particular visions about it, leaving specific contributions as they build their consumer behavior models. The dissertation general objective is studying the consumer buying process, emphasizing the several steps that take part in this process. The objective of the first part of this dissertation is capturing and integrating the most recent studies about consumer buying behavior models, starting by Engel, Kollat and Blackwell original model and its newest version (Miniard). There is also a review of literature about internet as a distribution channel, which is considered a revolutionary channel, but has been rarely studied when related to the buying decision process. The second part of this dissertation brings a quantitative descriptive empirical research, focused on a specific target and a specific consumption category: Business Administration college students (from Graduation and Pos-Graduation) who bought books through the internet at least once in the twelve-month period before the survey. The final results point to Blackwell, Engel and Miniard model as the most complete (as in a study from 1974). Some differences were found at the empirical research results compared to the reviewed literature: the more frequent use of external search compared to the internal one, the intense use of experimental sources for the search, the low-frequent use of the internet as a way to search for information and the high incidence of mouth-to-mouth communication (as receptors and propagators).
Purpose
Going further on a broad understanding of nonwork besides family, this study aims to analyze differences between women and men considering work-nonwork conflict (WNWC) in the Brazilian context, investigating time spent in eight nonwork dimensions and the dimensions more affected.
Design/methodology/approach
The study was quantitative and descriptive. A survey was conducted, based on a validated WNWC scale. The sample consisted of 338 professionals working in Brazil. Data analysis was conducted through descriptive statistics and analysis of variance.
Findings
Compared to men, women declare higher levels of WNWC considering the eight nonwork dimensions, present greater differences in stress-based conflicts and in more collective dimensions and have marriage or no children associated with more WNWC.
Research limitations/implications
The study highlights the need to include more nonwork aspects into career and management studies to influence organizational practices and individual choices. The main limitation is the non-probabilistic sample (results not generalizable).
Practical implications
Know more about WNWC will help organizations to improve lives by creating practices and a cultural environment to preserve women’s and men’s nonwork times. It may also help people to choose places to work for, matching their nonwork needs.
Social implications
The study reinforces demands from new family arrangements, more couples in dual-career and an aging society: organizations must prepare to have workers that want or need to dedicate time to other interests besides family or children.
Originality/value
It goes further on a broad understanding of nonwork besides family to understand WNWC and how it may affect differently men and women.
This article discusses the use and the ways of assessment of the internet as a source of information due to the agility that this way has been providing to the Marketing Information System, which also shows to be fragile in terms of reliability of the available information The study consists of an exploratory research, which includes literature review and multiple case studies, and presents as its objective the understanding of how the internet is used in the processes of data source definition and evaluation in a company, from the user's point of view. The results indicate that the internet is an important source of information, but there is little systematization in the information collection and the sources evaluation is based only on the users' individual and practical knowledge.
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