The “academic-practitioner gap” is a problem that marketers have kept at arm’s length by rhetoric and promises and neither substantive nor metatheoretical implications have been considered. In this paper, with regard to three topical domains — Market segmentation, Brand positioning, and Product versus Brand — differences in the concepts the terms designate in academic and practitioner usage are explored.

A formulation ofr the explanation of behavior is needed to guide the work of the applied psychologist whose first task is to explain behavior. It can also serve as a coordinating framework for the basic research that centers around each of psychology’s many constructs. This paper puts forward the notion that the appropriate framework reflects the intersection of numerous person and environment systems; in other words, that it is found in the structure of a situation.

When you see a commercial on television do you sometimes ask yourself: Whose attention is it seeking? To whom is it talking? Have you then asked yourself: Why those people? Was that an active choice? Whose choice? Prompted by what considerations? What alternative strategies for attention engagement were available?

Marketing’s first law, “Don’t sell what you happen to make; make what the consumer wants to buy,” is implemented through the identification of consumer wants and the formulation of brand positionings to respond to these wants. In a competitive environment, this means, in particular, the identification of consumer wants that are not being addressed or adequately satisfied by the brands currently available.

For a number of years motivation as an explicit focus for marketing research has been neglected. In the business community “motivation research” has come to refer to a specific research approach, in spired by a particular theory of motivational dynamics (Dichter, 1960, 1964; Martineau, 1957). As the methodology and its theoretical underpinning fell out of favor, motivation research largely disappeared from the marketing researcher’s roster of research categories.

Consumers of goods and services perceive themselves to be in one of five motivating situations, each of which has an activating condition and behavior mode.

The term “emotion” is mentioned on five pages out of four thousand or so found in seven Consumer Behavior texts with publishing or revision dates in 1978, 1979, and 1980.

When you see a commercial on television do you sometimes ask yourself: Whose attention is it seeking?

A view of motivational and reinforcement phenomena is presented and is used as the basis for a taxonomy of situations.