Contagion in Consumer Behavior: An Essay About Evolution, Nature and Insights for Future Research

Resumo

Since its origin in Fracastoro's contagion theory (LEDERBERG, 2000), the term contagion has expanded to explain behaviors in other areas of knowledge, such as consumer behavior. However, in view of this wide diversity and possibilities of applying the contagion to explain attitudes and behaviors in the sphere of consumption, it is necessary that there is a synthesis and classification of the main points of comprehension of the concept. Therefore, the main objective of this article will be to classify these different applications of the term contagion, based on the nature of the studied behavior. For this, a review of the literature was carried out, so that it was verified that the main behaviors that the contagion has tried to explain relate to the collective, emotional, social and physical aspects aspects.This effort to classify the phenomenon was important to bring future research possibilities with the computational resources nowadays, specially Natural Language Processing tools.