Direct Observation of Purchasing Behavior

Using observational research for behavioural segmentation of shoppers

“…They called this method memomotion study. Wells and LoSciuto (1966) studied the influence of children on cereal choice decision-making and found that most children attempted to influence their parents and many of them succeeded. Supporting this method, Rubens (1975) suggested that a camouflaged study could bring out several aspects of behaviour that shoppers may not be able to verbalise.…”

“…The second method involves entry and exit interviews to understand planned and unplanned purchases and the causes of deviation from plan (Kollat and Willet, 1967). The third approach has been to directly observe shoppers while they perform their shopping activity (Wells and LoSciuto, 1966). In many cases the latter has been preferred over interviews and laboratory experiments.…”

New Sport Teams and the Development of Brand Community

“…Yin also advocated that direct observations can support alternate sources of data such as interviews, and are useful in providing additional information about a studied topic. Wells and Lo Sciuto (1966) suggested that the main advantage in undertaking direct observation is that it can produce a highly detailed and accurate record of what people actually do compared to what they say.…”

Spending time, spending money: passenger segmentation in an international airport

“…In addition, it was possible to identify the shopping behaviour of each individual and record the number of shops visited, the time spent in each outlet and whether or not the individual made a purchase. The use of observational techniques as a research methodology is not new (Hicks and Kohl, 1955;Wells and LoSciuto, 1966) and has been used in previous studies of both segmentation and tenant placement (Brown, 1992;Sinha and Uniyal, 2004).…”