Consumer Behavior under Severe Restriction: A Look at Differences between Affluent and Impoverished People

The field of consumer behavior has a lengthy history of examination of the processes and nuances associated with the acquisition, consumption, and dispossession of goods and services. From its very inception as an academic field, substantive domains and methodologies have been explicitly interdisciplinary and include economics, psychology, sociology, anthropology, as well as other fields. How ever, despite this broad reach, most investigations have concentrated their attention on a rather small percentage of the entire world population and geographic locations (Martin and Hill 2012), emphasizing relatively elite portions of the economically developed west. Yet we assume our research is generalizable to the entirety of humankind. This situation raises several distinct possibilities that have implications for consumer theory development. First, the 85 percent of the human population that has received only limited attention by scholars has the same needs and wants as the predominantly western elite consumers because of widespread exposure to media and other sources of information associated with the larger consumer culture (Alden et al. 1999). If this proposition is true, differences are a matter of scale rather than perspective or process. Such worthy research has influenced the Bottom-of-the-Pyramid movement in business that a multi-billion persons market exists, which requires similar products in smaller, more affordable portions and sizes (Prahalad and Hart 2002).