The “Why” Matters: The Imperative to Understand Consumer Behavior in a Data-Driven World

In an increasingly data-driven world that prioritizes predictive and generative models, it has become more crucial than ever to focus on and to understand the psychological mechanisms that explain and drive consumer behavior. Indeed, consumers today are routinely exposed to individualized recommendations generated by predictive models – e.g., which product to buy, which advertisement to click on, or which social media post to like. Furthermore, technologies such as ChatGPT have brought the collective knowledge of the entire internet to our fingertips. These technological advances provide novel ways to collect, analyze, and visualize data to generate consumer insights.

However, despite the apparent benefits of these technologies for companies and researchers, large generative and predictive models remain black boxes, and their outputs (what most likely happens) do not necessarily translate into a true understanding of consumer behavior (why it happens). The contribution of consumer research to these challenges ought to be not only documenting what consumers do, but also understanding why consumers behave the way do and why this matters for marketing managers. Therefore, there is a clear imperative to better understand consumer behavior in today’s data-driven world.To this end, we welcome diverse discussion focusing on practically and managerially relevant insights on consumer behavior that broadly adhere to (but are not constrained by) the conference theme.

We welcome both empirical and conceptual research, including submissions that offer theoretical contributions but are also relevant for the practice of marketing. We are especially open to mixed method and multi-method submissions that focus on making sense of consumer behavior in a data-driven world.