Biology and consumer behaviour Biology and consumer behaviour Consumer behaviour is the study of the motivations surrounding a purchase of a product or service. It has been linked to the field of psychology, sociology and economics in attempts to analyse when, why, where and how people purchase in the way that they do. However, little literature has considered the link between our consumption behaviour and the basics of our being, our biology. Segmentation by biological-driven demographics such as sex and age are already popular and pervasive in marketing. As more knowledge and research is known, targeting based on consumers' biology is of growing interest
Structure and agency issue at the heart of both classical and contemporary sociological theory: the question of social ontology: "What is the social world made of?" "What is a cause of the social world, and what is an effect?" "Do social structures determine an individual's behaviour or does human agency?" Structural functionalists such as Émile Durkheim see structure and hierarchy as essential in establishing the very existence of society. Theorists such as Karl Marx, by contrast, emphasize that the social structure can act to the detriment of the majority of individuals in a society. In both these instances "structure" may refer to something