ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the challenge to use behavioral analysis in marketing research from a theoretical point of view. It describes the current consumer research is criticized for its psychologistic bias and the alternative behavior-based perspective. Its advantages in suggesting parsimonious theory which eliminates the excess intellectual baggage of unhelpful or untestable concepts related to mental events or processes are described by reference to attitude' and innate innovativeness'. The chapter describes the rigorous behaviorism is compared with behavior-based theory which admits cognitive mediation and a strategy for progressive research. The notion of attitude', which is one of the most widely used concepts in consumer research where it is employed principally to predict behavior, is clearly no more than an explanatory fiction. Researchers who have accepted the relative time of adoption definition have measured innovativeness by means of straightforward observation. An alternative approach is the cross-sectional methodology, in which respondents indicate what innovation within a given product range they have adopted.
