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Understanding
Consumer
Buying
Behavior
McGraw-Hill/Irwin Copyright © 2010 by The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. All rights reserved.
The Psychological Importance of the
Purchase
• High-involvement purchases:
– Involve goods or services that are
psychologically important to the buyer
because they address social or ego needs
and therefore carry social and psychological
risks.
– May also involve financial risk.
– A high-involvement product for one buyer may
be a low-involvement one for another.
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Steps in the High-Involvement, Complex Decision-Making
Process
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High-Involvement Purchase Decisions
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High-Involvement Purchase Decisions
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High-Involvement Purchase Decisions
• Sources of information
– Personal sources
– Commercial sources
– Public sources of information
• Commercial sources perform an informing function
for consumers.
• Personal and public sources serve an evaluating
and legitimizing function.
• The Internet is reducing the opportunity costs of
information gathering
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High-Involvement Purchase Decisions
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High-Involvement Purchase Decisions
• Step 4: Purchase
– Consumers usually select the source they
perceive to be best on those attributes most
important to them.
• Step 5: Postpurchase evaluation
– The person’s expectation level and evaluation
of how well the product actually did perform.
– The evaluation feeds back into memory where
it can be recalled for a similar decision.
– Consistent positive experiences can ultimately
lead to brand loyalty.
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Low-Involvement Purchase
Decisions
• Most purchase decisions are low in
consumer involvement.
– Extensive information search is absent.
• Two low-involvement buying decisions:
– Inertia
• Consumers either buy brands at random or buy the
same brand repetitively to avoid making a choice.
– Impulse purchasing and variety seeking
• Occurs when consumers impulsively decide to buy
a different brand from their customary choice or
some new variety of a product.
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The Psychological Importance of the
Purchase
• Understanding level of involvement
enables better marketing decisions
– Product design and positioning decisions
• High-involvement goods needs to be designed to
provide at least some benefits that are
demonstrably superior.
• Firms that market low-involvement goods need to
pay particular attention to basic use-related
attributes.
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The Psychological Importance of the
Purchase
– Pricing decisions
• High-involvement: Purchase of brand they
believe will deliver the greatest value.
• Low-involvement: Products are largely or
solely bought on the basis of low price.
– Advertising and promotion decisions
• High-involvement: Promotional vehicles
that communicate in greater detail.
• Low-involvement: Focus on a few main
points and deliver the message frequently.
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The Psychological Importance of the
Purchase
– Distribution decisions
• Low-involvement: Extensive retail distribution
is particularly important.
• High-involvement: Extensive retail coverage is
less critical.
– Strategies to increase consumer involvement
• Link the product to some involving issue.
• Tie the product to a personally involving
situation.
• Add an important feature to an unimportant
product.
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The Marketing Implications of
Psychological and Personal Influences
• Perception and memory
– Perception is the process by which a person
selects, organizes, and interprets information.
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The Marketing Implications of
Psychological and Personal Influences
• Perception process for high-involvement
products:
– Exposure to a piece of information, such as a
new product, an ad, or a friend’s
recommendation, leads to attention, then to
comprehension, and finally to retention in
memory.
– Once consumers have fully perceived the
information, they use it to evaluate alternative
brands and to decide which to purchase.
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The Marketing Implications of
Psychological and Personal Influences
• Perception process for low-involvement
products:
– Consumers have information in their
memories without going through the
sequence of attention and comprehension.
– Exposure may cause consumers to retain
enough information so that they are familiar
with a brand when they see it in a store.
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The Marketing Implications of
Psychological and Personal Influences
• Selectivity and organization guide
consumers’ perceptual processes and help
explain why different consumers perceive
product information differently.
– Selectivity: Even though the environment is
full of product information, consumers pick
and choose only selected pieces of
information and ignore the rest.
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The Marketing Implications of
Psychological and Personal Influences
– Perceptual vigilance: For high-involvement
purchases, consumers pay particular attention
to information related to the needs they want
to satisfy and the particular brands they are
considering for purchase
– Perceptual Defense: Consumers tend to avoid
information that contradicts their current
beliefs and attitudes.
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The Marketing Implications of
Psychological and Personal Influences
• Memory limitations
– Limitation of the human memory concerns marketers.
• Human memory works in two stages:
– Information from the environment is first processed by
the short-term memory, which forgets most of it within
30 seconds or less.
– Some information is transferred to long-term memory.
– For information to be transferred to long-term memory
for later recall, it must be actively rehearsed and
internalized.
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The Marketing Implications of
Psychological and Personal Influences
• Perceptual organization
– Categorization helps consumers process
known information quickly and efficiently.
– Integration means that consumers perceive
separate pieces of related information as an
organized whole.
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The Marketing Implications of
Psychological and Personal Influences
• Effects of stimulus characteristics
– Personal characteristics influence the
information consumers pay attention to,
comprehend, and remember.
– Message characteristics and the way it is
communicated influence consumers’
perceptions.
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The Marketing Implications of
Psychological and Personal Influences
• Needs and Attitudes
– The Fishbein model specifies how consumers
combine evaluations of a brand across
multiple attributes to arrive at a single overall
attitude toward that brand.
– This approach is compensatory in nature.
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The Marketing Implications of
Psychological and Personal Influences
• Noncompensatory attitude models
– The mental processes involved in forming an
attitude are quite complex.
– Consumers may evaluate alternative brands
on only one attribute at a time particularly with
low-involvement products.
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The Marketing Implications of
Psychological and Personal Influences
• Marketing implications of attitude models
– Marketers must have information about:
• The attributes or decision criteria used to evaluate
a particular product category.
• The relative importance of those attributes to
different consumers.
• How consumers rate their brand relative to
competitors’ offerings on important attributes.
– Multiattribute models show the consumer’s
ideal combination of product/service
attributes, each of which is weighted as to its
relative importance.
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The Marketing Implications of
Psychological and Personal Influences
• Attitude change
– Changing attitudes toward the product class
or type.
– Changing the importance attached to
attributes.
– Adding a salient attribute to the existing set.
– Improving ratings of the brand on one or more
salient attributes.
– Lowering the ratings of the salient product
characteristics of competing brands.
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The Marketing Implications of
Psychological and Personal Influences
• Demographics influence
– The nature of consumers’ needs and wants.
– Their ability to buy products or services to
satisfy those needs.
– The perceived importance of various
attributes or choice criteria used to evaluate
alternative brands.
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The Marketing Implications of
Psychological and Personal Influences
• Personality and self-concept
– Brands are perceived to have personalities,
and consumers are likely to choose brands
whose personalities match their own.
– Consumers tend to choose brands with
personalities that match either their own self-
concept or their ideal self-concept.
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The Marketing Implications of
Psychological and Personal Influences
• Lifestyles
– To obtain lifestyle data, consumers are asked
to indicate the extent to which they
agree/disagree with a series of statements
involving price consciousness, family
activities, spectator sports, traditional values,
adverturesomeness, and fashion.
– Lifestyle typologies or psychographic profiles.
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The Marketing Implications of
Social Influences
• Culture
– Culture is the set of beliefs, attitudes, and
behavior patterns shared by members of a
society and transmitted from one generation
to the next through socialization.
– Cultural differences across countries create
both problems and opportunities for
international marketers.
– Subcultures
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The Marketing Implications of
Social Influences
• Social class
– Status groupings largely based on similarities
in income, education, and occupation.
– It is possible to infer certain behavior
concerning some products and services,
including class members’ reactions to
advertising.
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The Marketing Implications of
Social Influences
• Reference groups include a variety of
groups that affect consumer behavior
through:
• Normative compliance
• Value-expressed influence: Involves conforming to
gain status within one’s group.
• Informational influence: Involves the use of certain
influentials to help assess the merits of a given
product/service.
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The Marketing Implications of
Social Influences
• The Family
– It serves as the primary socialization agent.
– It has a great and lasting influence on its
younger members’ attitudes toward various
brands and stores.
– Family members tend to specialize in the
purchase of certain products either because
of their interest or expertise or the role
structure of the family.
– Influence varies across countries.
– Family life cycle.
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Take-Aways
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Take-Aways
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Take-Aways
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