Professional Documents
Culture Documents
PROCESS
Grboveanu Sorina-Raula
University of Craiova, Faculty of Economics and Business Administration, 13 A.I.Cuza Craiova,
sorinagirboveanu@yahoo.com, 0723-577-164
Crciun Liviu
University of Craiova, Faculty of Economics and Business Administration, 13 A.I.Cuza Craiova,
lcraciun70@yahoo.com, 0744-197-459
Meghian Georgeta-Mdlina
University of Craiova, Faculty of Economics and Business Administration, 13 A.I.Cuza Craiova,
madalina_meghisan@yahoo.com, 0744-398-230
Abstract: The purchase process is a decision-making process under risk. The selection of one brand over
all other brands is a process of optimizing the consumers utility. This optimization is done under
uncertainty, since the buyer does not have perfect information. According to this process, buyers must
always choose between making an immediate decision (to buy or not to buy) or delaying this decision to
seek additional information, and thus reduce the decision risk. To purchase a product or a brand, buyers
need a certain level of information; pre-purchase information-seeking activities depend on four factors:
two factors are purchase-situation related, and the two other factors relate to the type of product and
market.
Key words: purchase decision, uncertainty, advertising, pre-purchase information-seeking
1. INTRODUCTION
Needs and motivations are the starting points of purchase decisions. For a purchase to take place, buyers
must experience sufficiently positive attitudes toward the product and the brand and consciously felt needs.
When all the elements of the marketing program are properly designed, a buyer will include the advertised
brand in his or her evoked set of brands, which is all the brands that are considered for purchase. These
elements of the marketing program include designing the product to have the attributes buyers seek,
ensuring that the product is available at conveniently located retail stores, and setting a price that buyers
perceive as reasonable. This article describes the process buyers follow to select a brand from within their
evoked set. Emphasis is put on elements of the process that advertisers can influence through a welldesigned communication program.
4.
A state of doubt, arising from the impossibility of possessing all relevant information on the
different products and brands. Buyers are also uncertain about how well a given product or brand
will satisfy their needs and desires.
When they buy a specific brand, buyers have expectations. This notion of expectation is intimately related
to any purchase decision. A consumer who buys a product has developed definite expectations about the
consumption of this product. Consumers buy a certain brand because it is preferable to competing brands;
they have implicitly or explicitly anticipated that the selected brand will yield more satisfaction than the
other brands and that it will respond more appropriately to the relevant set of felt needs. Hence, the amount
of satisfaction consumers anticipate they will receive from a certain brand constitutes the expectations
raised by the selected brand. An overview of consumers purchase decision process is shown in Figure 1
(Darmon&Laroche, 1991).
No purchase
(Frustration)
Additional
information
search
Attitudes
Needs and
Motivations
Evoked
set
Evaluation process
Product
Price
Place
Purchase
Expectations
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897
Pre-Purchase
Information
Seeking
Activities
household appliances, and furniture (products for which occasions of purchase cannot be predicted, which
most consumers buy only occasionally).
Level of Perceived Risk. In general, the nature of the risk physical, financial, and/or psychological as
well as the level of the risk depend on the kind of purchase contemplated. Buying a candy bar typically
does not involve the same level of risk as buying an expensive second-hand sports car. When buyers
perceive a high risk in a purchase situation, they will generally require more information about the brand
and the product class before making a decision. The relationship between the size of the risk and the
consumers information research depends, in turn, on the consumers attitude toward risk.
CONCLUSIONS
Because buyers must act on the basis of incomplete information, they automatically and consciously incur
a risk in every purchase and non-purchase decision. The size of the risk buyers perceive depends on the
importance of the particular purchase and on the quantity of relevant information about the product
category and the competing brands. A purchase decision can be considered as an optimization process
through which buyers seek the product or the brand that will yield the greatest satisfaction. The choice
process can be considered as the search for the most satisfying trade-off among brands that possess
desirable attributes at different levels.
Once a purchase is completed, the buyer expects the products or services to provide the satisfaction he or
she was seeking and that motivated the purchase. For goods with a short consumption cycle, consumers
can judge if the product meets their expectations by using it immediately. But with durable products with
long consumption cycles, consumers cannot tell immediately whether the product will meet their
expectations. Therefore, a distinction must be drawn between the post-purchase feelings, and the postusage feelings.
Buyer behaviour and the information acquisition process can be viewed as a continuous system. Prepurchase information-seeking activities depend on four factors that have an important time dimension: the
urgency of the purchase situation; the level of information the buyer has acquired; the length and regularity
of the purchase cycle for a particular product type and the risk perceived by consumers in the purchase
situation.
Consumers run a certain risk in making a decision based on present information because this imperfect
information does not enable them to predict exactly which product will procure the maximum satisfaction
sought nor which brand really has the qualities desired. Thus, buyers are generally more responsive to
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different brand advertisements while they are seeking information on these brands. This is why they
become a choice target for the advertiser, provided the advertiser can identify and locate them.
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