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Chapter 1
DOI: 10.4018/978-1-5225-7906-9.ch001
ABSTRACT
Consumption is a global phenomenon that permeates virtually every walk of life in developed and de-
veloping nations. Consequently, extant literature is awash with postulations on consumer behavior in
these contexts in varying forms. Most of the perspectives relating to developing nations explicate various
issues that revolve around how the lower economic development in these nations afects their consump-
tion when compared to what is in place in developed countries. Nonetheless, this chapter which classi-
fes the key infuences on consumer behavior into three factors, namely personal factors, socio-cultural
factors, and marketing stimuli, argues that the consumption pattern of consumers in the contemporary
developing nations tend to mirror that of developed nations in many ramifcations. Thus, the chapter
suggests that the consumption pattern of consumers in these nations is changing signifcantly by the day
from what it used to be in response to the pace of changes in the global marketing environment such as
the interconnectedness of people through technological advancement.
INTRODUCTION
One of the established perspectives in the extant consumer behaviour literature is that consumers could
be categorised in various ways using different bases (Gbadamosi, 2018a, Saleem et al., 2018; Kotler
& Armstrong, 2018). In its basic form, this could be done with respect to geography, behaviour, psy-
chographics, and demography. As a matter of fact, each of these broad categorisations also has further
sub-factors such age, income, gender, and ethnicity that could give further explication around the issue of
what consumers buy, where they buy them from, how they buy them, and when they do so. Accordingly,
A Conceptual Overview
of Consumer Behavior
in the Contemporary
Developing Nations
Ayantunji Gbadamosi
University of East London, UK