Important Note : This is a summary of few of the aspects discussed in class.

It is not exhaustive
nor covers the entire syllabus. Please treat this note as supporting study material along with other
necessary things.

Consumer Behaviour
The aim of marketing is to meet and satisfy target customers needs and wants better than
competitors. Marketers are always looking for emerging customer trends that suggest new marketing
opportunities. Successful marketing requires that companies fully connect with their customers.
Adopting a holistic marketing orientation means understanding customers gaining a 360-degree
view of both their daily lives and the changes that occur during their lifetimes so that the right
products are marketed to the right customers in the right way.
WHAT INFLUENCES CONSUMER BEHAVIOR?
A consumers buying behavior is influenced by cultural, social, and personal factors. Cultural factors
exert the broadest and deepest influence.

Cultural Factors
Culture is the fundamental determinant of a persons wants and behaviors.
Each culture consists of smaller subcultures that provide more specific identification and socialization
for their members.
A) Subcultures include nationalities, religions, racial groups, and geographic regions.
B) Multicultural marketing grew out of careful marketing research that revealed that different
ethic and demographic niches did not always respond favorable to mass-market advertising.
C) Virtually all human societies exhibit social stratification. Social stratification sometimes takes
the form of a caste system where members of different castes are reared for certain roles and
cannot change their caste membership.
D) More frequently, it takes the form of social classes, relatively homogeneous and enduring
divisions in a society that are hierarchically ordered and whose members share similar values,
interests, and behavior.
E) One class depiction of social classes in India defined descending levels:
A1, A2, B1, B2, C, D, E1, E2 for urban areas and R1, R2, R3, R4 for rural areas
F) Social classes have several characteristics:
1) Those within a class tend to behave more alike than persons from two
different social classes
2) Persons are perceived as occupying inferior or superior positions
according to social class.
3) Social class is indicated by a cluster of variables (occupation, income, etc.) rather than by
any single variable.

4) Individuals can move up or down the social-class ladder.

G) Social classes show distinct product and brand preferences in many areas.
H) Social classes differ in media preferences.
I) There are language differences among the social classes.

Social Factors
In addition to cultural factors, a consumers behavior is influenced by such social factors as reference
groups, family, and social roles and statuses.
A) A persons reference groups consists of all the groups that have a direct (face-to-face) or
indirect influence on his/her attitudes or behavior.
1) Groups having a direct influence on a person are called membership groups.
a. Some memberships groups are primary groups such as family, friends, neighbors, and
co-workers with whom the person interacts fairly continuously and informally.
b. Some membership groups are secondary groups such as religious, professional groups
that tend to be more formal.
2) Reference groups expose an individual to new behaviors and lifestyles, influencing
attitudes and self-concept.
3) They create pressures for conformity that may affect actual product and brand choices.
4) People are also influenced by groups to which they do no belong:
a. Aspiration groups are those a person hopes to join.
b. Dissociative groups are those whose values or behavior an individual rejects. The
buyer evaluates these elements together with the monetary cost to form a total
customer cost.
C) Manufacturers of products and brands where group influence is strong must determine how
to reach and influence opinion leaders in these reference groups.
D) An opinion leader is the person in informal, product-related communications who offers advice
or information about a specific product or product category.
E) Marketers try to reach opinion leaders by identifying demographic and psychographic
characteristics associated with opinion leadership, identifying the media read by opinion
leaders, and directing messages at opinion leaders.

Family
The family is the most important consumer-buying organization in society, and family members
constitute the most influential primary reference group.
A) We can distinguish between two families in the buyers life.
1) The family of orientation consists of parents and siblings.

2) A more direct influence on everyday buying behavior is the family of procreation namely,
ones spouse and children.
B) The makeup of the Indian family has changed dramatically.
C) Marketers are interested in the roles and relative influence of family members in the
purchase of a large variety of products and services.
D) With expensive products and services, the vast majority of husbands and wives engage in
more joint decision-making.
E) Men and women may respond differently to marketing messages.
F) Another shift in buying patterns is an increase in the amount of money spent and the direct
and indirect influence wielded by children and teens.
Roles and Statuses
A) A person participates in many groups and a persons position in each group can be defined in
terms of role and status.
B) Each role carries a status.
C) Marketers must be aware of the status symbol potential of products and brands.

Personal Factors
A buyers decisions are also influenced by personal characteristics. These include the buyers age and
stage in the life cycle; occupation and economic circumstances; personality and self-concept; and
lifestyle and values.

Age and Stage in the Life Cycle

People buy different goods and services over a lifetime. Adults experience certain passages or
transformations as they go through life.
A) Critical life events or transitions give rise to new needs.

Occupation and Economic Circumstances

Occupation influences consumption patterns and economic circumstances influence product.
Product choice is greatly affected by economic circumstances including:
A) Spendable income (level, stability, and time pattern)
B) Savings and assets
C) Debts
D) Borrowing power
E) Attitudes toward spending and saving

Personality and Self-Concept

Each person has personality characteristics that influence his or her buying behavior.
Personality: A set of distinguishing human psychological traits that lead to relatively consistent and
enduring responses to environmental stimuli.
A) The idea is that brands have personalities and consumers are likely to choose brands whose
personalities match their own.
B) We define brand personality as the specific mix of human traits that may be attributed to a
particular brand. Jennifer Aaker identified the following five traits:
1) Sincerity (down-to-earth)
2) Excitement (daring)
3) Competence (reliable)
4) Sophistication (upper-class)
5) Ruggedness (outdoorsy)
C) Consumers also choose and use brand that have a brand personality consistent with their
own actual self-concept (how one views themselves).
D) Although in some cases, the match may be based on the consumers ideal self-concept (how
we would like to view ourselves).
E) Others self-concept (how we think others see us).

Lifestyles and Value

A) People from the same subculture, social class, and occupation may lead quite different
lifestyles. A lifestyle is a persons pattern of living in the world as expressed in activities,
interests, and opinions. Lifestyle portrays the whole person interacting with his or her
environment.
B) Marketers search for relationships between their products and lifestyle groups.
C) Lifestyle is a persons pattern of living in the world as expressed in activities, interests, and
opinions.
D) LOHAS is an acronym standing for: Lifestyles of health and sustainability
E) Lifestyles are shaped partly by whether consumers are money-constrained or timeconstrained.
F) Consumers who experience time famine are pront to multitasking, doing two or more things
at the same time.

THE BUYING DECISION PROCESS: THE FIVE-STAGE MODEL

These basic psychological processes play an important role in understanding how consumers actually
make their buying decisions. Marketers must understand every facet of consumer behavior.
Marketing scholars have developed a stage model of the buying-decision process.
The consumer passes through five stages:
A) Problem recognition
B) Information search
C) Evaluation of alternatives
D) Purchase decision
F) Postpurchase behavior
Problem Recognition
A) The buying process starts when the buyer recognizes a problem or need.
B) The need can be triggered by internal or external stimuli.
C) Marketers need to identify the circumstances that trigger a particular need so that they can
develop marketing strategies that trigger consumer interest.
Information Search
A) An aroused consumer will be inclined to search for more information. We can distinguish
between two types of arousal.
B) The milder state is called heightened attention where a person simply becomes more
receptive to information about a product.
C) The second level is active information search where a person looks for reading material, going
online, etc. to learn about the product.
Information Sources
1) Personal (family, friends)
2) Commercial (advertising, Web sites, salespeople)
3) Public (mass media, consumer organizations)
4) Experiential (handling, examining, using the product)
D) Generally speaking the consumer receives the most information about a product from
commercial sources.
E) The most effective information often comes from personal sources or public sources that are
independent authorities.
Search Dynamics
A) Total set
B) Awareness set
C) Consideration set

H) Market partitioning

Evaluation of Alternatives
No single process is used by all consumers or by one consumer in all buying situations. The most
current models see the process as cognitively orientated.
A) First, the consumer is trying to satisfy a need.
B) Second, the consumer is looking for certain benefits from the product solution.
C) Third, the consumer sees each product as a bundle of attributes with varying abilities for
delivering the benefits sought to satisfy this need.

Beliefs and Attitudes

Evaluations often reflect beliefs and attitudes. Through experience and learning, people acquire
beliefs and attitudes. These in turn influence buying behavior.
A) Belief a descriptive thought that a person holds about something.
B) Attitudea persons enduring favorable or unfavorable evaluation, emotional feeling, and
action tendencies toward some object or idea.
C) Attitudes put people into a frame of mind.
D) Attitudes lead people to behave in a fairly consistent way toward similar objects.
E) Attitudes can be very difficult to change.
Expectancy-Value Model
The expectancy-value model of attitude formation posits that consumers evaluate products and
services by combining their brand beliefsthe positives and negatives according to importance.
Most consumers consider several attributes in their purchase decisions.

Purchase Decisions
In the evaluation stage, the consumer forms preferences among the brands in the choice set. The
consumer may also form an intention to buy the most preferred brand. In executing a purchase
intention, the consumer may make up to five sub-decisions:
A) Brand
B) Dealer
C) Quantity
D) Timing
E) Payment-method

Purchase Decision
In executing a purchase intention, the consumer may make up to five subdecisions:
A) Brand (brand A)
B) Dealer (dealer 2)
C) Quantity (one)
D) Timing (weekend)
F) Payment method (credit card)
Intervening Factors
Even if consumers form brand evaluations, two general factors can intervene between the purchase
intention and the purchase decision.
A) The first factor is the attitudes of others. The extent to which another persons attitude
reduces the preference for an alternative depends on two things:
1) The intensity of the other persons negative attitude toward the consumers preferred
alternative.
2) The consumers motivation to comply with the other persons wishes
B) The second factor is unanticipated situational factors that may erupt to change the purchase
intention.
C) A consumers decision to modify, postpone, or avoid a purchase decision is heavily influenced
by perceived risk. There are many types of risks that consumers may perceive in buying and
consuming a product:
1) Functional risk
2) Physical risk
3) Financial risk
4) Social risk
5) Psychological risk
6) Time risk
D) Marketers must understand the factors that provoke a feeling of risk in consumers and
provide information and support to reduce perceived risk.

Post-Purchase Behavior
After the purchase, the consumer might experience dissonance about their purchase and be alert to
information that supports their decision. Marketing communications should supply beliefs and
evaluations that reinforce the consumers choice and help him or her feel good about the brand.

A) Marketers must monitor post-purchase satisfaction, post-purchase actions, and postpurchase uses.
Post-Purchase Satisfaction
Satisfaction is a function of the closeness between expectations and the products perceived
performance.
A) If the performance fall short of expectations the consumer is disappointed.
B) If the performance meets expectations the consumer is satisfied.
C) If the performance exceeds expectations the consumer is delighted.
D) Consumer form their expectations on the basis of messages received from sellers, friends, and
other information sources.
E) The importance of post-purchase satisfaction suggests that a product claim must truthfully
represent the products likely performance.

Post-Purchase Actions
Satisfaction or dissatisfaction with the product will influence subsequent behavior. A dissatisfied
consumer may abandon or return the product.
Post-Purchase Use and Disposal
Marketers should also monitor how buyers use and dispose of the product. A key driver of sales
frequency is product consumption rate.
A) One potential opportunity to increase frequency of product use is when consumers
perceptions of their usage differ from reality.
B) Marketers must also need to know how the consumer disposes of the product once it is used.