Chapter 6 - Consumer Behaviour

Factors Influencing the Consumer Decision Process

• Consumers can be influenced by various factors:

  • Elements of the marketing mix

  • Psychological factors, which influences internal to the customer:

    • motives, attitudes, perception, learning

  • Social factors, such as:

    • family, reference groups, culture

  • Situational factors, such as:

    • specific purchase situation, temporal state (time of day)

• Every decision will take consumers through some form of the consumer decision processs

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Psychological Factors

• Psychological factors include: motives, attitudes, perception, learning, and lifestyle.

Motives

• Marketing is all about satisfying customer needs and wants

• motive: a need or want that is strong enough to cause the person to seek satisfaction.

• Maslow's hierarchy of needs: a paradigm for classifying people's motives. It argues that when lower-level, more basic needs (physiological and safety) are fulfilled, people turn to satisfying their higher-level human needs (social and personal)

  • Categorized five groups of needs:

    • physiological needs: those relating to the basic biological necessities of life (food, water, shelter)
    • safety needs: pertains to protection and physical well-being (secure employment, health)
    • love needs: needs expressed through interactions with others (friendship, family)
    • esteem needs: needs that enable people to fulfill inner desires (confidence, respect)
    • self-actualization: when a person is completely satisfied with his or her life (people engage in personal growth activities and attempt to meet their intellectual, aesthetic, creative, and other such needs)

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Attitude

• attitude: a person's enduring evaluation of his or her feelings about and behavioural tendencies toward an object or idea; consists of three components: cognitive, affective, and behavioural

• attitude consists of three components:

  • cognitive component: a component of attitude that reflects what a person believes to be true
  • affective component: a component of attitude that reflects what a person feels about the issue at hand – his or her like or dislike of something
  • behavioural component: a component of attitude that comprises the actions a person takes with regard to the issue at hand

Perception

• perception: the process by which people select, organize, and interpret information to form a meaningful picture of the world
• Perception in marketing influences our consumption through our tendency to assign meaning to things such as colour, taste, and packaging

Learning

• learning: refers to a change in a person's though process or behaviour that arises from experience and takes place throughout the consumer decision process

• learning from online reviews, articles, and new pieces of information

• Learning affects both attitudes and perceptions.

Lifestyle

• lifestyles: refers to the way a person lives his or her life to achieve goals

• Question: does the product/service fit with their actual lifestyle or their perceived lifestyle

  • Some like the image of what the product displays

Social Factors

• The consumer decision process if influenced from within by psychological factors, but also by the external, social environment

Family

• Many purchase decisions are made about products/services that entire family will use
• When families make decisions, they often consider needs of all family members

Reference Groups

• reference groups: one or more persons whom an individual uses as a basis for comparison regarding beliefs, feelings, and behaviours

  • consumer might have multiple references groups: friends, family, coworkers, or famous people

• Reference groups affect buying decisions by:

  1. offering information
  2. providing rewards for specific purchasing behaviours
  3. enhancing a consumer's self-image

Culture

• culture: the set of values, guiding beliefs, understandings, and ways of doing things shared by members of a society; exists on two levels: visible artifacts and underlying values

Situational Factors

• situational factors: factors affecting the consumer decision process: those that are specific to the situation that may override, or at least influence, psychological and social issues

Purchase Situation

• Although customers may be predisposed to purchase certain products because of some underlying psychological trait, factors may change in certain purchase situations

• Customer may be buying for someone else and will purchase differently if she was shopping for herself.

Shopping Situation

• Customer may be ready to purchase a certain product but derailed once in store.

• Marketers use techniques to influence consumers at this stage

  • Store Atmosphere

  • Salespeople

    • Can influence sale at point of purchase by educating consumers about product attributes, pointing out advantages

  • Crowding

    • Customers can feel crowded, too much people, too much merchandise
    • May feel distracted and may leave

  • In-Store Demonstrations

  • Promotions

    • In store promotions such as buy 1 get 1 free

  • Packaging

Temporal State

• Customer's state of mind at any time can alter preconceived notions of what we are going to purchase

• Parking ticket right before!

Involvement and Consumer Buying Decisions

• Consumers can make two types of buying decisions:

  • extended problem solving

  • limited problem solving

    • impulse purchases
    • habitual decision making

• involvement: consumer's interest in a product or service

• High-involvement consumer will scrutinize all the information provided

  • Will process elements on message more deeply

• Low-involvement consumer will process information in a less thorough manner and focus on heuristic elements such as brand name or celebrity endorser

Extended Problem Solving

• Buying process beings when consumers recognize that they have unsatisfied need
• Involved consumer begins by looking for advice from friends, reading magazines, and conducting research online and spent effort analyzing alternatives
• extended problem solving: a purchase decision process during which the consumer devotes considerable time and effort to analyzing alternatives; often occurs when the consumer perceives that the purchase decision entails a lot of risk

Limited Problem Solving

• limited problem solving: occurs during a purchase decision that calls for, at most, a moderate amount of effort and time
• Usually relies on past experience more than external information
• impulse buying: a buying decision made by consumers on the spot when they see the merchanding
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• Some purchases require even less thought:
• habitual decision process: a purchase decision process in which consumers engage with little conscious effort