Book review

This is a laudable attempt to address an emerging, important, and complex subject in a rigorously analytical manner. Indeed, this approach makes it appear, in parts, to be an extremely high-level text. In reality, however, this book is written in extremely accessible language and many concepts are explained at a basic level. Its intellectual accessibility is perhaps most evident (and valuable) in the early chapters, in which the authors provide a clear, logical framework for conceptualising the very broad and complex field of consumer behaviour research and modelling. Usefully, the authors clearly locate their work in the specific domain of ‘Consumer Choice Theory’, as opposed to the broader field of consumer behaviour or related areas such as ‘advertising effects’. Indeed, this clarity and attention to signposting is a continuous theme, and strength, of the book with the authors stating clearly the aims and rationale of each chapter at its outset. Whilst the fairly gentle introduction is welcome, however, the reader may come to view much of the content in these early chapters as a little too vague, in the sense that it does not provide the necessary theoretical foundation for some of the applications and conclusions drawn later in the text. As the book progresses, the introduction of the authors’ own research is useful and done with a significant degree of discipline. In particular, the authors take great care to set this in the context of the broad historical and contemporary research framework they seek to develop, and thus ensure it serves to provide a better understanding of how this is now developing. Throughout the book, the authors draw on a very broad range of literature from related disciplines, most notably that of neuropsychology. This commendable attempt to underpin consumer choice theory with basic scientific research from this area is characterised by a very accessible and readable presentation of the key implications of this literature for consumer choice theory. However, in providing such an accessible overview the authors (inevitably perhaps) do not clearly acknowledge the current complexity and ambiguity of basic research in the field of neuropsychology, which may have significant implications for our understanding of consumer decision-making. For example, in their presentation of what is ‘currently actually known about how humans make decisions’ (p. 99) in Chapter 4, the authors refer to the semantic nature of implicit memory. Whilst it may indeed by true that implicit memory has a semantic dimension, this is not yet widely accepted in the scientific literature, with a number of prominent authors asserting the view that implicit memory is purely a ‘perceptual representation system’ (Tulving and Schacter 1990). As an introduction to the field and its potential implications for consumer decision-making, this chapter is extremely valuable, but readers should be aware that basic neuroscientific research is still relatively underdeveloped and may not yet constitute a solid platform on which to base studies and conclusions regarding consumer decision-making. Journal of Marketing Communications Vol. 14, No. 3, July 2008, 243–245