Review of Emotion and Reason in Consumer Behavior (Hardcover)

Those who have tried teaching advertising management know the delicate balance between practice and theory that we would like to maintain. Except for the fact it is altogether too tempting to rely on practice entirely, when you examine the available textbooks. Indeed, popular advertising texts (e.g., Kleppner's Advertising Procedure) are driven by the practical (or the industry point of view) without much attention to scholarly research. At a cursory view, it seems as if that is what students want as well - to have a practitioner with years of experience as an account or creative person to teach advertising management. After all, we who know marketing should stick to the customers' needs and wants! This, though, is lamentable to many consumer behavior researchers who aspire to the ideal confluence of teaching and research in the advertising arena. Simultaneously, business schools should be something more than vocational schools that produce advertising account executives or creative directors. As we know for a fact, they come back to school, yearning for some theoretical knowledge! Especially for the graduate level, you would ideally like to provide solid theoretical grounds on how academic research can systemically contribute to the knowledge base in the advertising world.

Teaching theory-based research with the practical advertising mindset will become much easier with Chaudhuri's new book, Emotion and Reason in Consumer Behavior. Rather than relying on a general consumer behavior text (such as Hoyer and McInnis), which may already have been used for the pre-requisite course of Consumer Behavior, using this text can cover a comprehensive range of main consumer behavior topics, including attitude, involvement, and learning, while being privy to explicitly linked areas of advertising that have been rigorously investigated (mostly by the author and his co-authors).

Another interesting factor in this text is the author's unique view of integrating research on emotions into the well-known areas of consumer behavior. Many students find it easy to relate that many areas of advertising are driven more by the emotion rather than cognition. For those students, Chaudhuri's new book will ease introduction of theoretical investigation of the emotion into the advertising classroom. For example, the author's research on the CASC scale (Chaudhuri and Buck, 1995) can readily be used to encourage students to conduct more rigorous research to fit their tasks at hand. Additionally, the discussion that forms the basis of the scale, of the triune brain including neomammalian, paleomammalian, and reptilian parts, is sure to fascinate and inspire readers.

Not only is this book recommended for students, but also for practitioners. The way each piece of the relevant research is illustrated at the end of each chapter will help practitioners in the industry (even without attending graduate schools!) to better understand and utilize results of scholarly research in the areas involving emotions.

In summary, Arjun Chaudhuri's new text of Emotion and Reason in Consumer Behavior is a definite must for those who wish to bring in scholarly perspectives of emotions in advertising into their curriculum as well as for those in the industry who wish to acquire the academic perspectives in the research of emotions.




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