Key Consumer Psychology & Buying Behavior - Essay Example

Marketing Essay Key Consumer Psychology & Buying Behavior INTRODUCTION It is veryimportant for the success of business to understand how different factors are involved in the consumer buying behavior and patterns. This helps to amplify the potential gains from the market in the form of increased sales and market share. Studies have shown that there are mainly four different factors that are involved in consumers’ buying decisions. These include cultural factors, social factors, personal factors and psychology factors. Thee psychological factors are further classified into an individuals, motivation, expectations and past experience, attitudes and beliefs, as well as their perception. These factors do not work individually and interact to influence the consumer in his buying behavior. We all wonder why people are more inclined to buy a particular type of product than another. The messages sent through media and advertisements also play a great role in influencing consumer psyche. All this is a prt of a very interesting field called consumer psychology. One formal study defines consumer psychology as, “The study of individuals, groups, or organizations and the processes they use to select, secure, use, and dispose of products, services, experiences, or ideas to satisfy needs and the impacts that these processes have on the consumer and society.” (1) Consumer psychology has recently attracted a lot of attention in both theory and practice of marketing due to its importance. It is aimed at understanding the consumers and how they react to various to products and services. A vast area of topics is concerned with the consumer psychology that looks forward to answer the following questions: How consumers decide on what products & services they want to choose? Though processes and decision making involved behind making above mentioned decisions The role of environmental variables such as, friends & family, media & advertisement, and social & cultural conditions in influencing consumer decisions Why people choose one product over another? What personal factors are involved in consumer buying patterns? What can be done to reach to the wide market of customers? (3) The following sections of the essay shed some light on how to answer these questions through addressing the consumer psychology according to consumer buying behavior theories and concepts that are involved. CONSUMER BEHAVIOR Marketers view each consumer as a single decision-making unit. They collect information relating to a product or service from various sources and through various dimensions analyze it. The decision resulting from their analysis is the buying or rejection of the product. Marketers look to understand the types of stimulating information that arouses the favorable consumer action towards their product and the extent of their understanding affects their success. This process is in fact based on the underlying philosophy of “consumer sovereignty” which dictates that the consumer plays the role of the king responsible for all decisions and the activities done by the vendors should therefore be focused on satisfying these customers. This should go along with the primary business objective of making profits. This point has been supported by Cundiff, Still and Govoni (1973) that the ultimate result of management in all departments is not just to satisfy the consumer needs, wants and desires but also to make sure that the organizations goals and objectives are achieved simultaneously. CONSUMER BUYING DECISION MAKING PROCESS The process of decision making means the underlying steps the consumers experience in order to select between the different market alternatives. Alternative products include, for example, different choices to achieve the same set of goals, like whether to fly by plan, travel by train; whether to select regular briefs or boxers etc. This is mainly a five step process. Each step occurs in succession to the previous step without any gaps. These steps are briefly discussed hereunder. Stage 1 – Problem Recognition We have learnt in the motivational psychology that unsatisfied needs arouse tension in an individual which drives him to a “search behavior”. This stage occurs when an individual senses a conflict between his or her desired state of affairs and current state of affairs. Internal & external stimuli play an important role in triggering these needs in an individual. As a part of their marketing strategy, marketers need to be aware of those circumstances that initiate a need in an individual consumer. The products in turn should be focused on addressing the needs of the consumers (5). Stage 2 – Information Search If the consumer’s need is very strong and an affordable product that caters to those needs is readily available to him, in all likelihood the consumer will buy that object. If not so, then the need may be stored in consumer’s memory for later satisfaction. Depending on the circumstances the consumer may undertake a heavy research, a little search or no further research on the needs and the available products. The most important sources which the consumer is most likely to turn to are of key importance to the marketers. These sources may be classified into: Personal sources like family and friends, commercial sources such as advertisements, social media and dealings with salespersons, public sources including mass media, and experimental sources which include expectations and experiences about using & handling the product. There is scope for marketing the product to get the brand into the prospective consumers’ awareness, consideration and choice sets as well (6). Stage 3 – Evaluation of Alternatives The information gathered in the above stage is used to arrive at a decision regarding the final choices. How the consumers process their information is a very important thing that should be determined by the marketers. Since each consumer has different needs, choices and thinking patterns their decision evaluation process is also likely to be different from each other. As a part of this stage a consumer also considers attributes of different products that interest them. These may be, for instance, in buying a camera the customer may consider the sharpness of image, quality and size of image, high-resolution capabilities, memory size, and of course the price. Stage 4 – Purchase Decision The decision depends on the many attributes of a product, but different consumers attach different meanings and importance weights to different types of attributes. Market can often be segmented according to the product attributes with high concern for a particular class of consumers. Marketers are therefore most interested in determining the attribute importance. Stage 5 – Evaluation procedure Finally in the last stage of the decision making process, the consumer evaluates different products to arrive at a final thought by developing his attitudes, judgments and preferences. Making a choice between different multi-attributive products can be a difficult task for consumer and the evaluation procedure varies from consumer to consumer depending the consumer’s perception, attitudes and interests (6). The effect of Consumer’s Perceived Value (CPV) on consumer’s buying behavior is discussed in detail in the following section. CASE STUDIES AND OTHER LITERATURE ON CONSUMER PSYCHOLOGY The following section discusses some of the research work and literature in the field of consumer psychology and buying behavior. The world today is a global village characterized by a global marketplace which is battered by the global forces of demand and supply. In order to succeed and continue performing well, firms need to keep on changing and evolving their products and services to suit the customer preferences. Therefore it is of utmost importance for the marketers to determine which factors and attributes are thought of by the potential consumers as the most important ones before purchasing it. In an attempt to determine the relationship between Consumer Perceived Values (CPV) and their buying behaviors, a study was conducted by Wahyu Adhi Nugroho & Luki Safitri Wihandoyo (2008) concentrated on the store brand product among the Indonesian consumers. The study investigates the relationship by taking into account the effects of factors such as brand loyalty, quality perception, price perception, familiarity, demographic factors, perceived risks and store brand attributes on a consumer’s buying behavior based of CPV. The target consumers of the research were grocery shoppers since the buying process in grocery shopping is affected by many factors which influence a consumers CPV and in turn their buying behavior as well. The target consumers were sent questionnaires in Bahasa Indonesian language. 300 questionnaires of 27 questions were distributed and various analysis were conducted including the mean value analysis, crosstab analysis, factor analysis, reliability analysis and frequency distribution of consumers were done after diving the population data through demographic factors such as age, gender, income level, education background, number of family members. The results of the research showed that two factors contribute largely to a consumer’s willing to purchase a store brand item, which are “Familiarity towards Store Brands” and “Quality Perception” (Nugroho & Wihandoyo, 2008). A positive relation between the consumer perceived value and their buying patterns were observed. To quote a paragraph from the Conclusion section of the journal article: “In overall, the findings shows that the perceived values of Indonesian grocery shoppers contribute positively to their perceptionsof store brands and the better knowledge on the aspects of store brand products due to their past experience in purchasing the items lead to positive perceptions which eventually will lead to good possibility for them in re-purchasing store brands products in the future.” Nugroho & Wihandoyo (2008, pp. 227). REFERENCES Read More