Service Management, Student Workbook: An Integrated Approach to Supply Chain Management and Operations

3. Customers: The Focus of Service Management

3.7. Summary of the Chapter

This chapter provides basic concepts of consumer behavior and a cultural and demographic profile of American consumers. Maslow’s hierarchy of needs is presented to explain some of the consumer needs. Maslow’s theory asserts that human needs have a hierarchy: Physiological needs or innate needs such as hunger and thirst have the first priority. Safety needs, social needs, esteem needs, and self-actualization needs have decreasing degrees of priority. Humans try to satisfy these needs in the given order of priority; however, a higher-level need may emerge even if lower-level needs have not been completely satisfied.

The Hawking, Best, and Coney consumer behavior model explains ...