Revisiting the Recent History of Consumer Behavior in Marketing Journals: A Topic Modeling Perspective

Abstract Through the years, a great deal of research had been dedicated to understanding how consumers think, feel, and behave in the marketplace. From its early development to the present, consumer researchers have adopted different methods and followed different approaches to describe the consumption phenomena. By pursuing a probabilistic approach, the current study aims to provide in-depth insight into consumer behavior research’s evolution and transformation between 1980 and 2020. The results exhibit a strong increase on subjects like consumer trust, self-identity, digital consumption, social media engagement, consumer culture theory, consumer motivation, and brand–consumer relationships. The citation analysis shows the most impactful articles and topics in consumer behavior research. The results indicate that articles on customer service satisfaction, experiential consumption, consumer trust, digital consumption, and social media engagement tend are heavily cited. And to understand each journals contribution an analysis based on citations, journal impact and topical diversity is also included. The study also includes the possible research directions for the future of consumer behavior.