When discussing consumer psychology, you try to get into the consumers head. In reality, the business owners play a mind game on the consumers for the consumers to lose money and him to gain money on their cost. As a business owner you need to dissect the area of where you are planning to put your business and to get into the consumers head. So, you can tell what people go for and what will make you money. For instance, McDonald's and Subway are popular fast food places and do make money. When trying to put out a popular place like McDonald's and/or Subway , you have to look at the income of the people that live in the area, population and families. The more people with a higher incomes will only make you have more money in your pocket and a better opportunity to expand your place of business.

To start off with, business owners have to figure out who their consumers are as Kendra Cherry of "The Psychology of Consumer Behavior" mentions. When evaluating a business, consumer psychologists look at many areas to see what gits right, such as how consumers chose products, services and products, the thought process behind thoughts and emotions behind consumer decisions, how environmental variables such as family, friends, media influence busying, what motivates people to buy that particular product over another product, how personal factors influence people to buy that product, and finally what can be done to reach consumers about that particular product. (Cherry, Kendra) If you were ever to open your own business, those are the six steps you should take deep detailed on. If you go through all six steps and all comes up clean, that your business will sell, then go right ahead and open the business. Of course, if you have the money. But like many entrepreneurs, they do not know when to give up and if they see not business selling or the six steps did not come up clean, they will keep the business up and running, losing more and more money each day. Researching is huge to being a consumer psychologist as you have to do your due diligence on your idea. Under researching also includes marketing. Marketing can be very expensive, but can find cheaper ways out of it. The expensive route is going commercials and ads in magazines or newspapers. If you want to go the cheap route, you can have sales, promotions or print out flyers and hand it out to your demographic area. In Cracking the Code of Consumer Psychology by Dorie Clark, Clark brings up a good point of business owners take easy routes out and do not do their due diligence on their business to see how it will fare in the demographic area. Clark also brings up a quote by the famous Steve Jobs; "people do not know what they want until you show them the service or product." That is a great quote by Mr. Jobs as that is 100% true. That is where your marketing will come in handy and have to do a great job. If you have great marketing, there will be no turning back and your business will have complete success.

Lastly, consumer psychology and marketing strategies are pretty similar. But like most definitions, both do have their differences.  Consumer psychology is the beginning process of research. As that means, doing research to see if that business will make the business owner money. Going back to those six steps above. If you go through the six steps and you say; "yes, I know my business will sell and the demographic area is perfect." When you say that to yourself, you can then move onto the marketing strategies Marketing strategies is just to see what ways you can put your topic on top and to get your product or service out there. Like I mentioned above, newspaper, ads, flyers or words of the mouth. Marketing is a lot of work but a process you have to do to make more money and to have a happy stress free life.

At the end of it all, opening a  business is a lot of work but if you nail all the steps, you will be a lot more happy than working a full-time job all the time looking up to another boss. The downfall is your business could fail and lose oout on money, but if you are confidence, that is a gamble worth taking.

http://psychology.about.com/od/branchesofpsycholog1/a/consumer-psychology.htm

http://www.forbes.com/sites/dorieclark/2013/08/20/cracking-the-code-of-consumer-psychology/