Talk:Consumer behaviour/Archives/2021

Consumer Awareness merge with Consumer Behaviour: Some Queries?

A number of problems/issues have arisen with the merge of consumer awareness with consumer behaviour. First, the article consumer awareness should never have been allowed to enter the mainspace. Its title and its subject matter is far too ambiguous to be useful. The obvious question to ask is, “Consumer awareness of what?” A cursory glance at the original article suggests that it is possibly concerned with the consumer’s awareness of brands and/or awareness of advertising. But that is far from clear since, in places, where the article was particularly unfocussed, it discusses consumer life concept, a term that is not defined in the article, and remains unknown with the disciplines of marketing and psychology. Wikipedia already has a number of articles that deal with brand awareness and advertising awareness. Brand awareness is more than adequately canvassed in the article, Brand Awareness. Advertising awareness is adequately canvassed in AIDA (marketing) and Advertising management. However, consumer life concept is not a concept that appears in the marketing literature, and there are few references to it in other disciplines including psychology. The term itself is not defined in the article, but the context; in which the term appears in a run-on paragraph following the definition of consumer awareness, combined with the sources which are concerned with advertising awareness, suggest that a reasonable reading of the original passage is that ‘consumer life concept’ and ‘consumer awareness’ are synonyms. In short, there was no need for a new article on Consumer awareness as its core themes are amply covered in well-sourced articles elsewhere on Wikipedia.

Second, much of the original content in the article Consumer awareness was unreferenced, poorly sourced or represented gross misinterpretations of the sources cited. It would appear that sources have been deliberately misrepresented so as to fit with the “consumer life concept” discussion. Consider the following paragraph (transcribed from the consumer awareness article, and now languishing in the consumer behaviour article): “The change of life concept is the subjective factor of the change of consumer awareness. As people's living standards continue to increase and incomes continue to increase, people's life concepts are constantly changing.. Differences in consumer personality are the internal motivations for changes in consumer awareness.”

The reference used for the first sentence does not check out. The authors of the cited article never use the term, “consumer life concept” anywhere in their article. Indeed, the cited article, which is very dated (1985), is concerned with brand awareness and advertising awareness. The second sentence in the paragraph remains unsourced. Overall, this is a very poor paragraph, characteristic of much of the entire original article on consumer awareness, that adds no real value to the destination article, Consumer behaviour.

Much of the content in the consumer awareness article should have been deleted prior to any merge. Articles that are well-sourced and accurate should not be forced to inherit sloppy, badly written, poorly conceptualised and vague content arising from merges.

Third, in spite of the reservations outlined in the preceding paragraphs, even if an editor wishes to merge content, its placement within the destination article requires a little consideration. As it currently stands, the merged content was simply dumped between a major heading and its sub-headings, thereby disrupting both the flow and the internal logic of the destination article, Consumer Behaviour. Furthermore, much of the dumped content merely repeats ideas that are canvassed elsewhere in the article and are therefore redundant.

My recommendations are: (1) that editors with some subject matter expertise carry out merges for complex or technical concepts such as consumer behaviour, brand awareness, and: (2) that reasonable attempts be made to integrate the new material into the existing article, and: (3) he entire section on consumer awareness be removed from the article on consumer behaviour, based on the grounds that it is vague, includes content that cannot be validated by sources, is poorly sourced, potentially misleading and is not constructive.

Someone had to do the merge and no-one with subject expertise had done it. I certainly recommend you make the changes you propose. Pinkbeast (talk) 20:22, 21 June 2019 (UTC)

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