Consumer behaviour postgraduate personal statement example

Personal statement example

My undergraduate degree in Psychology taught me to be careful about what people say they will do. For my final-year project I ran a small online study comparing two label descriptions for the same tinned soup, one emphasising ingredients and one emphasising who made it, and measured stated purchase intention. The effect I found was modest and my sample was a convenience sample of students, so I was cautious in my conclusions. What stayed with me was not the result but the gap between an intention measured in a quiet online task and a decision made in a supermarket aisle with a basket already half full. Studying consumer behaviour at master's level is the way I want to close that gap, working with theory and methods built for real markets rather than laboratory proxies.

Since graduating I have worked as a customer insight assistant for a chain of garden centres, where I prepare the monthly membership report. Much of my time goes on coding free-text survey comments and reconciling them with loyalty card data. The work is ordinary but instructive. Members write warmly about staff and about the cafe, then their transaction records show them visiting mainly in spring for bedding plants. Ratings and behaviour tell different stories, and my job is often to explain to colleagues why a high satisfaction score does not translate into visits in November. I have also seen how quickly an internal assumption hardens into a segment label, and how rarely anyone revisits whether the label still describes anyone. I would like the training to challenge that properly, with a better grasp of segmentation methods, choice modelling and the limits of self-report data.

My reading outside work has shaped what I want to study. Kahneman's Thinking, Fast and Slow gave me the vocabulary of dual-process reasoning, though I have become more interested in the critiques of how far laboratory findings on heuristics generalise to habitual, repeated purchasing. Byron Sharp's How Brands Grow was useful precisely because it unsettled me: the emphasis on mental and physical availability, and on brand growth coming largely from light buyers, sits awkwardly with the psychological approach I was trained in, and I want to work through that tension with proper guidance rather than choosing a side from a summary. I have also been reading about household decision-making, which speaks directly to what I observe at work, where a purchase is frequently negotiated between two people with different priorities.

Two smaller commitments have taught me things a report cannot. I run a secondhand book stall at a monthly market, which has made me sceptical of my own instincts. Titles I expected to sell sat unsold, while pricing everything in round pounds and grouping books by mood rather than genre made a noticeable difference to how long people browsed. I also help my aunt with her tailoring business, mostly writing her service descriptions and photographing finished work. Persuading her to quote alteration prices as a clear list rather than case by case was a long conversation, but enquiries became easier to handle and fewer customers asked for a discount.

I am applying now because I have enough workplace experience to know which questions matter to me and not enough training to answer them well. In the longer term I want to work in consumer insight for an organisation that treats research as a genuine input to decisions, and I would welcome the chance to build a dissertation around habitual, seasonal purchasing.