Black Box Model

The black box model of consumer behaviour identifies the stimuli responsible for buyer behaviour. The stimuli (advertisement and other forms of promotion about the product) that is presented to the consumer by the marketer and the environment is dealt with by the buyer’s black box. The buyer’s black box, comprises two sub components - the buyer’s characteristics and the buyer decision process.

The black box theory is fairly popular method to describe psychology. It is not possible to open the human mind to look inside, we can only do something to the mind. The art of understanding human psyche in terms of stimulus and response.

The black box theory is of mental consciousness, which states that the mind is fully understood once the inputs and outputs are well defined, and binds this with a radical skepticism regarding the possibility of ever successfully describing the underlying structure, mechanism, and dynamics of the mind.

 

Example - 1

Discount offers – During discount seasons, Malls, and stores are filled with customers thinking they will get high price products in cheap and this thinking of the customers let them spend more as they actually want.  But discounts varies from brand to brand. No-one knows how they decide the amount of discounts to be given. They all are busy in buying. This is black box approach of companies to sell more of their items because of  consumers thinking and behavior.

Example - 2

Coding- Many companies outsource any coder or give its IT related work on a contract basis. They don’t know what coding they are doing what applications they are using, but they are only interested in the output of what they had done. It’s a black box model in which company gives data to coder and get output but unaware what happened in between.