CHAPTER 0NE

1. Describe the interrelationship between consumer behavior and the marketing

concept?
Ans: Companies use marketing concepts to promote and sell their products or
services, and consumer behavior is how consumers act and respond in the retail
environment. In order for a company to create a strong marketing campaign, it is
important to understand how and to what the consumer will respond. This
relationship between marketing and consumer behavior involves studies, focus
groups, psychological analyses and other methods of studying the market for a
particular product or service. Studying the relationship between marketing and
consumer behavior provides companies with information about their target
audiences that they can use when developing ad campaigns. Focus groups are a
method of consumer research that involves small groups of people in which a
product is discussed. This provides a small sample of how people will react to the
product and what elements they will find the most valuable. Understanding
consumer behavior is critical for marketing any product or service successfully.
When a company can understand why people buy what they buy and the reasons
behind their decisions as consumers, the company can create a marketing
campaign that specifically addresses those elements of the purchasing decision. An
understanding of consumer behavior provides important clues that can help you
identify market segments most likely to respond to your product or service offerings
and marketing communication programs
the strategic and applied field of consumer behavior is rooted in three
philosophically different business orientation that lead up to an extremely important
business orientation known as the marketing concept. the three orientations are
production orientation, sales orientation and marketing orientation. accepting a
marketing orientation corresponded to the beginning of this third business
orientation, which leads to the core philosophy of marketing, namely the marketing
concept, a company must determine the needs and wants of specific target markets
and deliver the desired satisfactions better than the competition. moreover, within
the context of the marketing concept, a satisfactory profit is envisioned as an
appropriate reward for satisfying consumers' needs, not as a right of simple being in
business
2. describe the relationship between consumer research market segmentation
and targeting, and the development of the marketing mix for a manufacturer
of HDTV sets
Consumer research describes the process and tools used to study consumer
behavior. Broadly speaking, there are two theoretical perspectives that guide the
development of consumer research methodology: the positivist approach (objective
and empirical causal research) and the interpretivist approach (qualitative and
based on small samples).
The focus of the marketing concept is consumer needs. Three elements for creating
a strategic framework for discovering and analyzing those needs are market
segmentation, market targeting, and positioning. Market segmentation is the
process of dividing a market into subsets of consumers with common needs or
characteristics. Because most companies have limited resources, few companies
can pursue all of the segments identified for the company to pursue. Market
targeting is selecting one or more of the segments identified for the company to
pursue. Because many companies have adopted the marketing concept, the
marketplace is filled with many products and services claiming to satisfy consumer
needs. Positioning is developing a distinct image for the product or service in the
mind of the consumer, an image that will differentiate the offering from competing
ones and squarely communicate to consumers that the particular product or service
will fulfill their needs better than competing brands. The marketing mix consists of a
companys service and/or product offerings to consumers and the methods and
tools it selects to accomplish the exchange. Product, price, place, and promotion are
the elements that make up this mix