Consumer Behavior in the Wake of the Essay

Consumer Behavior

In the wake of the London 2012 Olympics, discount airliner Easyjet recorded a boost in its business. The company reported that demand for flights from London was strong after the Games, boosting profit expectations for the year from £280m-£300m to £310m-£320m (BBC, 2012). The company noted several factors that contributed to the boost, many of which relate to the concept of consumer behaviour. For example, the article cites that flights out of London increased to beach markets in particular. It also noted that there were fewer delays at London airports during the summer.

Hoyer and Macinnis (2009, p.3) define consumer behaviour as "The totality of consumers' decisions with respect to the acquisition, consumption, and disposition of goods, services, time and ideas by human decision-making units (over time)." This definition highlights that all consumer purchase decisions are comprised of a number of different inputs. Early research on consumer behaviour was the most successful in identifying the core elements of consumer behaviour, while later research appears to focus on specific, acute problems that cannot be extrapolated to other industries. Some of the basic literature therefore provides unique insight into the possible reasons for the change in buying patterns for vacations among Londoners after the Olympics in the summer of 2012.

Moutinho (1993) discusses the determinants of behaviour with respect to tourism. In particular, he notes the power of reference group influences. The Easyjet report hints at the possibility that Londoners had delayed their summer vacations until after the Olympics, creating an excess of demand over expectations in the post-Olympic period.Easyjet may not have noticed a change in demand during the Olympics because of Olympic-specific demand. For Londoners, however, here was a collective decision to delay vacations until after the Olympics. Some may have left to avoid the Games, but it is possible that people's reference groups were making the decision to be in London for the Games, and then vacation afterwards. The result would have been a large number of consumers making this choice.

Tourist demand modeling, as Moutinho notes, can help to understand demand patterns. While Easyjet's own modeling failed to predict the upsurge in demand, that only implies imperfect modeling. Consumer behavior models should incorporate all relevant information, so studies should have included travel patterns in Vancouver, Sydney or Salt Lake following their respective Olympic Games. Also, consumer behavior studies recently have shown that behavior can be predicted by understanding web search patterns (Goel et al., 2010). This would have indicated that either London consumers were investigating later vacations, that foreigners visiting the Olympics were planning to stay in the UK and then leave later, or both.

It is more likely that Easyjet based its forecasts on ideas about the ritual aspects of consumer behavior. Rook (1985) discusses the role that rituals play in making purchase decisions. Easyjet likely assumed that vacation travel patterns would….....