Analyzing consumer

markets and buyer

behavior
introduction
The aim of marketing is to meet and satisfy target customer’s needs and
wants.
The field of consumer behavior studies how individuals, groups, and
organizations select, buy, use and dispose of goods, services, ideas, or
experiences to satisfy their needs and desires.
Understanding consumer behavior and knowing customers is never
simple. Customers may say one thing but do another.
Influencing buyer behavior
The starting model for understanding buyer behavior is “stimulus
response-model”
The marketer’s task is to understand what happen in the buyer’s
consciousness between the arrival of outside stimuli and the purchase
decisions.
Model of buyer behavior.

Buyer’s
Decision
process Buyer’s
•Problem Decision
recognition •Product
Marketing Other Buyer’s choice
•Information
stimuli stimuli charactristics •Brand
search
•Product •economic •Cultural choice
•Evaluation of
•Price •technlg •Social •Dealer
alternatives
•Place •Political •Personal choice
•Purchase
•promotion •cultural •psychological •Purchase
decision
•Post timing
purchase •Purchase
behavior amount
Cultural factors
◦ Culture is the fundamental determinant of a person’s wants
and behavior.
◦ A person acquires a set of values, perceptions, preferences,
and behaviors through his or her family and other key
institutions.
◦ Each culture consists of smaller sub culture that provide more
specifications and socialization for their members.
◦ Sub cultures include nationalities, religions, racial groups, and
geographic regions.
◦ When subcultures grow large enough, companies often design
specialized marketing programs to serve them.
Social factors
Reference groups : consists of all the groups that have a
direct or indirect influence on the person’s attitudes or
behavior.
Groups having a direct influence on a person are called
memberships groups, such as: family, neighbors, friend, etc.
Family
Two kind of families in the buyer’s life :
1. The family of orientation: consists of parents and siblings.
From parents a person acquires an orientation toward
religion, politics, economics, sense of personal ambitions.
2. The family of procreation : consists of one’s spouse and
children.
Roles and status
A role consists of the activities a person is expected to
perform.
Each role carries a status.
People choose products that communicate their role and
status in society.
Personal factors
Age and stage in the life cycle : people buy different goods
and services over a lifetime.
Occupation and economic circumstances.
Occupation influences consumption patterns, such as: a blue
collar worker will buy work clothes, work shoes, lunch-box,
while a company presidents will buy expensive suits, air
travel, and country club memberships.
 Life style
People from the same culture, social class, and occupation may lead
quite different lifestyles.
A lifestyle is a person’s pattern of living in the world as expressed in
activities, interests and opinions.
Marketers search for relationships between their products and lifestyle
groups.
 Personality and self-concept
each person has personality characteristics that influence his or her
buying behavior.
Personality is often described in term of such as self confidence,
dominance, autonomy, deference, sociability, defensiveness, and
adaptability.
Personality can be useful variable an analyzing consumer brand choices.
The idea is that brands also have personalities, and that consumers are
likely to choose brands whose personalities match their own.
Psychological factors
◦ Motivations
Maslow’s Theory: human’s needs ate arranged in a hierarchy,
from the most pressing to the least pressing. In order of
importance, they are physiological needs, safety needs, social
needs, esteem needs, and self-actualization needs. People will
try to satisfy their important first needs, when a person
succeeds in satisfying an important needs, he or she will then
try to satisfy the next-most-important needs.
 5.
Self-
Actualization
Needs

4. Esteem Needs

3. Social needs (love)

2. Safety needs (security)

1. physiological needs
(food, water, shelter)
◦ Perception
A motivated person is ready to act, how the motivated person actually acts
is influenced by his or her perception of the situations.
Perceptions can vary widely among individuals exposed to the same reality.
One person might perceive fast talking salesperson as aggressive , another,
as intelligent and hekpful.
People can emerge with different perceptions of the same object because
of three perceptual processes: selective attention, selective distortion,
selective retention.
Beliefs and attitudes
A belief is a descriptive thought that a person hold about
something.
People’s belief about product or brand influence their buying
decisions.
Marketers are interested in the beliefs people carry in their
heads about their products and brands. Brands beliefs exist
in consumer’s memory .
Attitudes is a person’s enduring favorable or unfavorable
evaluations, emotional feelings, and actions tendencies
toward some object or idea.
A person’s attitude settle into a consistent pattern, so a
company would be well advised to fit its product into existing
attitude rather than to try to change attitudes might pay off.
The buying decisions process
Marketers have to go beyond the various influence on buyers and
understanding how consumers actually make their buying decisions.
Specifically marketers must identify who makes the buying decisions,
the types of buying decisions, and the step in the buying decisions.
Buying roles
Buying roles change so the marketers must be careful in
making their targeting decisions.
We can distinguish five roles people play in buying decisions:
Initiator : the person who first suggests the idea of buying the product or service.
Influencer : the person whose view or advice influences the decisions.
Decider : the person who decides on any component of a buying decisions :
whether to buy, what to buy, how to buy, where to buy.
Buyer : the person who makes the actual purchase
User : the persons who consumes or uses the product or service.
Buying behavior
◦ Henry Assael distinguished four types of consumer buying based on the degree of
buyer involvement and the degree of differences among brands.

High Involvement Low Involvement

Significant
differences Complex buying Variety seeking buying
between brands behavior behavior

Dissonance reducing Habitual buying

Few differences
buying behavior behavior
between brands
 Complex buying behavior
 Consumers engage in complex buying behavior when they are highly involved in a
purchase and aware of significant differences among brands.
 This is usually the case when a product is expensive, bought infrequently, risky,
and highly self –expressive, like an Mobile Laptop, house, car
 Dissonance reducing buyer behavior
 Consumers sometimes engage in highly involved in a purchase but sees little
differences in brands.
 The high involvement based on the fact that the purchase is expensive,
infrequent, and risky.
 In this case the buyer will shop around to learn what is available. If they find
quality differences in the brands, they might go for the higher price. If they find
little differences, they might simply buy on price or convenience.
Habitual buying behavior
◦ Many products are bought under conditions of low involvement and the absence of
significant brand differences, for example: salt.
◦ There is good evidence that consumers have low involvement with most low-cost,
frequently purchased products.

Variety seeking buying behavior

◦ Some buying situations are characterized by low involvement but significant brand
differences.
◦ Here consumers often do a lot of brand switching.
◦ Brand switching occurs for the sake of variety rather than dissatisfaction.
 Stages of the buying decisions
process
Five stage model of the consumer buying process.

Evaluation Post
Problem Information Purchase
Of purchase
Recognition search Decisions
Alternatives Decisions
 Problem recognition
 The buying process starts when the buyer recognize a problem or need.
 The need can be triggered by internal or external stimuli.
 Marketers need to identify the circumstances that trigger a particular need.
 Information search
 An aroused consumer will be inclined to search more information.
 Two levels of arousal consumer:
 Heightened attention : a person simply becomes more receptive to information about product
 Active information search : a person who looking for reading material, phoning friends, and visiting stores to learn
about product.
 Consumer information sources:
 Personal sources : family, friends
 Commercial sources : advertising, sales persons
 Public sources : mass media
 Experiential sources : using the product.
Evaluation of alternatives
◦ Some basic concepts will help us understand consumer evaluation
process:
◦ First: The consumer is trying to satisfy needs
◦ Second: The consumers is looking for certain benefits from the product solution
◦ Third: The consumers sees each product as a bundle of attributes with varying abilities for
delivering benefits sought to satisfy this needs.
The attributes of interest to buyers vary by product:
◦ Cameras: picture sharpness, camera speeds, camera size
◦ Hotels: location, cleanliness, price, atmosphere
◦ Tires: safety, tread life, price, ride quality.
◦ Mouthwash: color, effectiveness, germ-killing capacity, price, taste/flavor
◦ Consumers will pay the most attention to attributes that deliver the sought benefits.
 Purchase decisions
 In the evaluation stage, the consumers form preferences among the
brands in the choice set.
 The consumers may also form an intention to buy the most preferred
brand.
 How ever two factors can intervene between the purchase intention and
the purchase decision.
 The first factor is the attitudes of others. The extent to which another
person’s attitude reduces one’s preferred alternatives depends on two
things:
 The intensity of the other person’s negative attitude toward the consumer’s preferred
alternative
 The consumer’s motivation to comply with the other person’s wishes
 The second factor is unanticipated situational factors that may erupt to
change the purchase intention.
 In executing a purchase intention, the consumers may make up to five
purchase sub decisions: a brand decisions, vendor decisions, quantity
decisions, timing decisions, payment method decisions .
Steps between evaluation of alternatives and a purchase decision.

Attitudes of
others

Evaluation of Purchase Purchase

alternatives intentions decisions

Un anticipated
Situational
factors
Post purchase behavior
◦ After purchasing the product, the consumer will experience some level of
satisfaction or dissatisfaction.
◦ Marketers must monitor post purchase satisfaction, post purchase actions and post
purchase product uses.
◦ Post purchase satisfaction
The buyer’s satisfaction is a function of the closeness between the buyer’s
expectations and the product’s perceived performance.
If performance falls short of expectations, the customer is disappointed; if it meets
expectations, the customer is satisfied; if it exceeds expectations, the customer is
delighted.
◦ Post purchase actions
satisfaction or dissatisfaction with the product will influence a consumer ‘s
subsequent behavior.
If the consumer is satisfied, he or she will exhibit a higher profitability of
purchasing the product again.
If the consumer is dissatisfied, they may abandon or return the product. They may
take public action by complaining to the company, going to a lawyer. They may take
private actions include : stop buying the products, warning friends, etc.
◦ Post purchase use and disposal
Marketers should also monitor how buyers use and dispose of the product.
If consumers store the product in a closet, the product is probably not very satisfying.
If they sell or trade the product, new product sales will be depressed.
If the consumers throw the product away, the marketer needs to know how they dispose of it,
especially if it can hurt the environment (such as: beverages containers and diapers).