CONSUMER MARKETS AND

CONSUMER BUYER BEHAVIOR

Chapter 5
 Chapter 5 Outline
 Model of Consumer Behavior
 Characteristics Affecting Consumer Behavior
 Cultural factors
 Social factors
 Personal factors
 Psychological factors
 The Buyer Decision Process
 Model of Consumer Behavior
 Consumer buyer behavior : The buying behavior of final
consumers, individuals and households, who buy goods and
services for personal consumption.
 Most large companies research consumer buying decisions in
detail to answer the questions about:
 What do consumers buy?
 Where do consumers buy?
 How and how much do consumers buy?
 When do consumers buy?
 Why consumers buy?
 Consumer market : All of the individual and household that
buy goods and services for personal consumption
 Model of Consumer Behavior
 Learning about the whys of consumer buying behavior
is not easy-the answers are locked deep within the
consumer’s mind.
 The main question for marketers is how consumers
respond to different marketing efforts that are used by
the company.
 The starting point is the stimulus-response model of
buying behavior.
 Marketing and other stimuli enter the consumer “black
box” and produce certain responses.
 Marketers must try to find out what is in the buyer’s
black box.
Stimulus-Response Model of Buyer
Behavior
 Model of Consumer Behavior
 Marketing stimuli is made up of the four Ps:
product, price, place, and promotion.
 Other stimuli include major forces in the buyer’s
environment: economic, technological, social, and
cultural.
 All these inputs enter the buyer’s black box, where
they are turned into a set of buyer responses-the
buyer’s brand and company relationship behavior
and what he or she buys, when, and how much.
 Model of Consumer Behavior
 Marketers want to understand how the stimuli are
changed into responses inside the consumer’s black
box, which has two parts.
1. The buyer’s characteristics influence how he or she
perceives and reacts to stimuli.
2. The buyer’s decision process itself affects his or her
behavior.
 Characteristics Affecting Consumer
Behavior
 Cultural factors:
 Culture is the learned values, perceptions, wants, and
behavior from family and other important institutions.
 Subculture are groups of people within a culture with
shared value systems based on common life experiences
and situations.
 Social classes are society's relatively permanent and
ordered divisions whose members share similar values,
interests, and behaviors.
 Marketers are interested in social classes because
people within a give social class usually exhibit similar
buying behavior.
 Characteristics Affecting Consumer
Behavior
 Social Factors:
Membership Aspirational Reference
Groups Groups Groups
• Groups with • Groups an • Groups that
direct influence individual form a
and to which a wishes to comparison or
person belong to. reference in
belongs. forming
attitudes or
behavior.
 Characteristics Affecting Consumer
Behavior
• Social Factors:
• Word-of-mouth influence can have a strong impact on
consumer buying behavior.
• Opinion leaders are people within a reference group
who exert social influence on others.
• Buzz marketing involves using opinion leaders to serve as
“brand ambassadors” who spread the word about the
company’s products.
• Online Social Networks are online communities where
people socialize or exchange information and opinion
 Characteristics Affecting Consumer
Behavior
 Social Factors:
 Family is the most important consumer-buying
organization in society.
 Marketers are interested in the roles and influence of
the husband, wife, and children on the purchase of
products and services.
 Social roles and status are the groups, family, clubs,
and organizations that a person belongs to.
 The person’s role and position in each group can be
defined in terms of roles and status.
 Characteristics Affecting Consumer
Behavior
 Personal factors:
 Age and life-cycle stage: Affects taste in clothes, furniture,
and recreation.
 Occupation affects the goods and services bought by
consumers.
 Economic situation: Marketers watch trends in personal
income, savings, and interest rates.
 Lifestyle is a person’s pattern of living as expressed in his or
her psychographics.
 It involves Measuring a consumer’s AIOs (activities, interests,
opinions) to capture information about a person’s pattern of
acting and interacting in the environment
 Characteristics Affecting Consumer
Behavior
 Personal factors:
 Personality refers to the unique psychological characteristics that lead to
consistent and lasting responses to the consumer’s environment.
 Personality is usually described in terms to traits such as:
 Self-confidence
 Dominance
 Sociability
 Autonomy
 Defensiveness
 Adaptability
 Aggressiveness
 A brand personality is the specific mix human traits that may be
attributed to a particular brand.
 Characteristics Affecting Consumer
Behavior
 Psychological Factors:
 A motive is a need that is sufficiently pressing to
direct the person to seek satisfaction.
 Abraham Maslow sought to explain why people are
driven by particular needs at particular times.
 Human needs are arranged in a hierarchy from the
most pressing at the bottom to the least pressing at
the top.
 A person tries to satisfy the most important need
first.
 Maslow’s
Hierarchy of Needs
 Maslow’s
Hierarchy of Needs
 Self-actualization needs-Self-development and
realization.
 Esteem needs- Self-esteem, recognition, and status.
 Social needs- Sense of belonging and love.
 Safety needs- Security and protection.
 Physiological needs- Hunger and thirst.
 Characteristics Affecting Consumer
Behavior
 Psychological Factors:
 Learning is the change in an individual’s behavior
arising from experience.
 Belief is a descriptive thought that a person has
about something based on knowledge, opinion, and
faith.
 Attitudes describe a person’s relatively consistent
evaluations, feelings, and tendencies toward an
object or idea.
The Buyer Decision Process
 The Buyer Decision Process
 1. Need Recognition: Occurs when the buyer
recognizes a problem or need is triggered by:
 Internal stimuli: Hunger, thirst.
 External stimuli: Advertisement.

 2. Information search-Consumers obtain information

from a number of sources including:
 Personal sources—family and friends
 Commercial sources—advertising, Internet
 Public sources—mass media, consumer organizations
 Experiential sources—handling, examining, using the
product
 The Buyer Decision Process
 3. Evaluation of Alternatives: Consumers process
information to choose among the alternative brands.
 How consumers choose among alternative brands depends
on the individual consumer and the specific buying
situation.
 Consumers sometimes use careful calculations and logical
thinking.
 Consumers sometimes do little or no evaluating of
alternative brands.
 Consumers sometimes make buying decisions on their own
and sometimes they get buying advice from friends, online
reviews, or salespeople.
 The Buyer Decision Process
 4. Purchase decision: Consumers usually buy their
preferred brand.
 Two factors can come between the purchase intention
and purchase decision:
 A) The attitudes of others: Example: If someone important
to the buyer thinks that he or she should buy the lowest
priced car, then the chances of the buyer buying a more
expensive car are reduced.
 B) Unexpected situational factors: Example: A buyer may
change his or her mind if a competitor lowers the price of
their products or the buyer loses his or her job
 The Buyer Decision Process
 5. Post purchase Behavior: The action that
consumers take after the purchase, based on their
satisfaction or dissatisfaction.
A consumers is either satisfied or dissatisfied based on
the difference between his or her expectation and the
product performance.
 The Buyer Decision Process
 The larger the gap between expectation and
performance, the greater the consumer’s
dissatisfaction.
 Cognitive dissonance is the discomfort caused by a
post-purchase conflict. Consumers feel at least some
postpurchase dissonance for every purchase.
 Customer satisfaction is a key to building
profitable relationships with consumers—to keeping
and growing consumers and reaping their customer
lifetime value.
 Reference
 Kotler, Philip and Gary Armstrong, Principles of
Marketing, 15th edition, Pearson Education Limited,
2014.