Trends in "Customer Understanding and Behavior": Values Surge, Purchase Models Fade, AI Still Doesn’t Connect

Expert commentary contributed by Pr.Elodie Jouny-Rivier *, Professor of Marketing at ESSCA School of Management, France. 

We analysed 225 special issue calls for papers (CFPs) from marketing journals published between 2022 and 2025. The advantage of looking at CFPs is that they are forward-looking: they reflect what editors believe the field still needs, and therefore what is likely to enter the publication pipeline over the next 2–3 years.

If there is one topic marketing should never abandon, it is the customer. The data confirms that editors are heavily leaning into it as well. The theme “Customer Understanding and Behavior”, appears in 196 of the 225 CFPs. In other words, when editors define the “gap” for a special issue, customer understanding shows up in almost nine out of ten calls. And it is not merely mentioned, but takes a large share of the editorial spotlight: across all CFPs, it receives an average emphasis of 16.1 points out of 100 (where 100 represents the full “attention budget” of a CFP).

Figure 1. Customer Understanding & Behavior appears in almost every CFP

Customer research is becoming more central over time. Between 2022 and 2025, the share of CFPs that include this theme rises from 73.3% to 91.5%. At the same time, its average emphasis rises from 14.4 to 18.0 points out of 100, illustrating that the “customer core” is intensifying.

Figure 2. Customer Understanding & Behavior across journal tiers and editorial teams

Note. Journal tier is based on ABS ratings: higher-tier journals are ABS 3, 4, or 4*; lower-tier journals are ABS 1 or 2. Editorial team composition is based on guest editors’ country affiliations relative to the journal’s home (publisher) country: ‘international’ teams are primarily affiliated outside the home country, while ‘domestic’ teams are largely affiliated within it. In this report, this editorial-team split is used as a proxy for locally anchored versus more cross-country framing of gaps.

Inside the customer theme, editors are choosing sides

In our analysis, customer research breaks into five subtopics:

1. Attitudes and brand perception

2. Decision-making and purchase behavior

3. Loyalty, satisfaction and retention

4. Motivation, needs and values

5. Segmentation, targeting and account-based marketing (ABM)

Figure 3. Customer Understanding & Behavior subthemes over time

The fastest-rising subtopic is Motivation, Needs and Values. It moves from 17.8% of CFPs in 2022 to 37.8% in 2025, effectively doubling. It appears in 59 CFPs overall. This reflects values-driven frameworks such as ethical consumption, sustainability values, cultural identity, social purpose, and meaning-making in consumption. Editors are not only asking “what do customers do?”, they are increasingly asking “what do customers stand for, and how does that shape markets?”

Attitudes, Beliefs and Brand Perception is the single most prevalent customer subtopic in the dataset. It appears in 69 CFPs, which is almost a third of the whole sample. It also rebounds strongly by 2025 (37.8%). Brand perception seems to be the language marketing keeps returning to, remaining a foundational agenda that editors repeatedly treat as a legitimate site for theory refinement and empirical contribution.

 “Although the dataset does not isolate youth-specific calls for papers, several structural trends identified in the report resonate strongly with research conducted on younger audiences and their evolving relationships with brands and digital environments. This is particularly salient when considering children and pre-adolescents, for whom consumption is deeply intertwined with play (fun), exploration (learning), and identity construction. The rapid rise of subtheme “Motivation, Needs & Values”, signals a structural move away from transactional and decision-centric models toward identity and value-based frameworks. In this sense, the subtheme increase can be interpreted as part of a broader disciplinary move toward accounting for more cultural heterogeneity, meaning-making, and purpose-driven consumption patterns that are particularly important among Gen Alpha and Gen Z.” 

The quiet decline: classic purchase-process models

Decision-Making and Purchase Behavior declines from 13.3% of CFPs in 2022 to 8.5% in 2025, and it hits a particularly low point in 2024. This implies that traditional purchase-process models may be seen as relatively mature territory, with fewer obvious routes to novelty. Importantly, this does not mean “decision-making is irrelevant.” It means editors are less likely to build a special issue around it unless it is reframed.

“This decline suggests a growing mismatch between traditional linear models and current consumption realities. From a youth research perspective, this decline is particularly coherent with research on digitally immersed youth, for whom consumer pathways are shaped by micro affordances, platform architectures, and social media dynamics (including influencers), rather than by sequential evaluative steps.” 

Loyalty, Satisfaction and Retention grows from 13.3% to 20.7% across the period. Yet the theme report notes that loyalty appears “present but isolated” in co-occurrence patterns, meaning it is less often bundled with the newer agendas that make CFPs feel distinctive. That is a meaningful demand signal: loyalty work is still commissioned, but it may increasingly need stronger links to newer concerns (values, engagement, platform dynamics, AI personalization) to be treated as “special issue worthy.”

Segmentation, Targeting and Account-Based Marketing remains a small slice overall (12 CFPs) and fluctuates across years. That volatility suggests segmentation research is not being positioned consistently as an editorial “gap category.”

Values research is being pulled upward by theory

When CFPs ask for research on motivation, needs and values, they frequently also ask for theory-building and synthesis (literature reviews and theoretical frameworks). In the dataset, that pairing appears in 31 CFPs: in about half of the calls that foreground values, editors explicitly also demand theory and conceptual grounding, not just empirical description. This is what makes the values trend publishable in high-quality outlets. Values-driven consumer work is being commissioned as theory-building, not just topic coverage.

A second, smaller but meaningful signal is that brand-perception CFPs increasingly invite interpretive depth, including qualitative and mixed methods. That is another indicator of “deeper” customer research, not just more customer research.

“The finding that this subtheme strongly co-occurs with theory-oriented subthemes points to a broader demand for interpretive depth. Rather than signaling abstraction, this pairing reflects the increasing need for conceptual frameworks capable of capturing complex motivational and symbolic processes.”

The gap editors are not filling (yet): AI-augmented customer insight

The most counterintuitive pattern in this theme report is a missing connection.

Even though AI appears in a large share of CFPs, the report finds that customer understanding and AI are rarely commissioned together as an integrated agenda, and the strongest co-occurrence list does not feature meaningful theme pairings.

Journals commission AI research as “what algorithms do,” and customer research as “what customers think and value,” but far less often commission work asking what AI reveals about customers that traditional approaches miss. For scholars making strategic choices, this is one of the clearest “white spaces” in the editorial agenda.

“This gap is somewhat surprising and points to an important research opportunity in areas such as affordances or youth engagement. Young users interact extensively with algorithmic systems i.e., recommendation engines, and adaptive interfaces (to name but a few) that shape their perceptions, opinions and choices. Understanding how these systems transform or mediate customer motivations, identity construction, or participation remains an underexplored but promising intersection between the themes.” 

What this suggests will be published in the next 2–3 years

• Expect strong pipeline momentum for values, meaning, identity, and purpose-driven consumption, especially when paired with theory-building.

• Expect brand perception to remain a foundational pillar and a reliable special issue anchor.

• Expect weaker pull for classic purchase-process models unless reframed.

• Treat AI-augmented customer insight as a high-value integration gap that editorial agendas are not yet fully exploiting.

 “This analysis reveals a deeper transformation in how the discipline conceptualizes the consumer. Rather than simply documenting behaviors, current research increasingly frames consumers as meaning-making agents whose motivations, values, and identities are at the center of the marketplace dynamics. Taken together, these trends suggest that customer research is increasingly less about documenting behaviors and more about explaining meaning, identity, and the systems that shape them.”

Edited by Dan Muravsky 01/05/2026

*Pr. Elodie Jouny-Rivier is Professor (HDR) of Marketing and Head of the Marketing Research Group at ESSCA. She specializes in consumer co-creation and children and family consumption, with a focus on how market and digital environments shape learning, socialization, and empowerment processes. She is Associate Editor of the Journal of Consumer Behaviour and leads the Research Chair “Future trends in family consumption” at ESSCA School of Management (France).