I recently gave a presentation about Consumer Behavior to a group of Freshman business students at UT Dallas. Consumer Behavior is one of my favorite marketing topics. Customers are (or certainly should be) at the center of a marketing plan and typically even a larger business plan. Overall consumer trends and macroeconomic factors impact so much of how customers behave that some of the best marketing organizations I deal with now rely heavily on data to make informed decisions. This data can be sourced from different tools, but most of those tools cost money. I talked about some of the tools that bigger clients and my previous larger employers used, plus some of the tools that everyone uses, regardless of size.