Nonconscious Consumer Psychology

What exactly is “nonconscious consumer psychology?” We use the term to describe a category of consumption behavior that is driven by processes that occur outside a consumer's conscious awareness. In other words, individuals engage in consumptionrelated cognition, motivation, decision making, emotion, and behavior without recognizing the role that nonconscious processes played in shaping them. A growing literature has documented that a wide range of consumption behaviors are strongly influenced by factors outside of people's conscious awareness. For instance, consumers are often unaware they have been exposed to an environmental cue that triggers a given consumption behavior, or are unaware of a mental process that is occurring outside conscious awareness, or are even unaware of the consumption-related outcome of such a nonconscious process (Chartrand, 2005). Such processes are often adaptive and highly functional, but at times can lead to undesirable outcomes for consumers. By shining a light on a wide range of nonconscious consumer psychology we hope to facilitate increased reliance on our unconscious systems in certain situations and equip consumers to defend themselves when unconscious processes can lead to negative outcomes. What exactly then is a nonconscious psychological process for a consumer? We define it as a subset of automatic processing (Bargh & Chartrand, 1999). An automatic process is one that, once set into motion, has no need of conscious intervention (Bargh, 1989). The labeling of automatic processes in social and cognitive psychology, including those set forth in dual process models, implies that processes are either automatic or they are not. Labels such as automatic/controlled, implicit/explicit, conscious/ nonconscious, spontaneous/deliberative, and System 1/System 2 by their dichotomous nature suggest that consumers are either in conscious decision making mode or have their unconscious driving their decision making entirely. However, there are