Book excerpt: Understanding Consumer Choice shows how attempts to relate consumers' attitudes and actions have implicitly incorporated measures of the very variables at the heart of a situational theory of consumer choice. These are the buyer's consumption history and the physical and social setting in which consumer behaviour occurs. The book explores the capacity of the resulting model to explain consumer behaviour in retail and consumption situations, and to elucidate brand choice. The result is a novel interrogation of cognitive and behavioural perspectives, an overarching philosophy for consumer research.