Factors That Influence Consumers’ Buying Behavior

I. Situational Factors
a. Atmospherics:physical factors that firms can control such as music
etc.
II. Social Situation
a. Some situations can make you feel like you have to buy something or
entice you to
III. Personality and Self-Concept
a. Openness
b. Conscientiousness
c. Extra version
d. Agreeableness
e. Neuroticism
f. Self-Concept: How you see yourself—be it positive or negative
g. Ideal Self: How you would like to see yourself
IV. Time
V. Mood
VI. Reason for the Purchase
VII. Gender, Age, and Stage of Life
a. Chronological age: actual age in years
b. Cognitive age: how old you perceive yourself to be
VIII. Lifestyle
a. Psychographics
i. Combines the lifestyle traits of consumers and their personality
styles with an analysis of their attitudes, activities, and &values
to determine groups of consumers with similar characteristics
IX. Motivation
a. Motivation:the inward drive we have to get what we need
b. Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs
i. Self-actualizations needs
ii. Esteem needs
iii. Social Needs
iv. Safety Needs
v. Physiological needs
X. Perception
a. Perception: How you interpret the world around you and make sense
of it in your brain
b. Selective attention: the process of filtering out information based on
how relevant it is to you
 c. Selective retention:People forget information even if it’s relevant to
them
d. Selective Distortion:misinterpretation of the intended message
e. Shock advertising:surprising stimuli
i. Shocking content increased attention
f. Subliminal advertising:exposing consumers to marketing stimuli such
as photos, ads, and messages by stealthily embedding them in movies,
ads, and other media.
i. (opposite of shock advertising)
XI. Learning
a. Learning: refers to the process by which consumers change their
behavior after they gain information or experience
b. Operant/Instrumental conditioning:Learning occurs through repetitive
behavior that has positive or negative consequences
c. Classical Conditioning:associating a conditioned stimulus (CS) with
and unconditioned stimulus (US).
XII. Attitude
a. Atittudes: “mental positions” or emotional feelings, favorable or
unfavorable evaluations, and action tendencies people have about
products, services, companies, ideas, issues, or institutions.
XIII. Societal Factors
a. Influence what you buy but only on a temporary basis
XIV. Culture
a. Culture:the shared beliefs, customers, behaviors, and attitudes that
characterize a society
XV. Subcultures
a. Subcultures:group of people within a culture who are different from
the dominant culture buy have something in common with one
another such as common interests, vocations or jobs, religions, ethnic
backgrounds, and geographic locations.
XVI. Social Class
a. Social class:group of people who have the social, economic,
educational status in society.
i. Upper-upper class
ii. Lower-upper class
iii. Upper-middle class
iv. Middle class
v. Working class
vi. Lower but Not the Lowest
vii. Lowest Class
 XVII. Reference Groups and Opinion Leaders
a. Reference Groups: groups a consumer identifies with and may want to
join
b. Dissociative groups: Groups where a consumer does not want to be
associated
c. Opinion Leaders: people with expertise in certain areas
XVIII. Family
a. Marketing to children has been critiqued
i. “pester power”

Low-involvement Versus High-Involvement Buying Decisions and the

Consumer’s Decision-Making Process
I. Level of Involvement:reflects how personally important or interested you are
in consuming a product and how much information you need to make a decision
II. Routine response behavior: Making automatic purchases decisions based on
limited information or information they have gathered in the past
III. Impulse buying:low-involvement purchases are made with no planning or
previous thought
IV. Low involvement decisions:aren’t necessarily products purchased on
impulse, although they can be
V. High-involvement decisions: carry a higher risk to buyers if they fail, are
complex, and/or have high price tags
VI. Extended Problem solving:spend a lot of time comparing different aspects
such as the features of the products, prices and warranties
VII. Limited Problem solving: already have some information about a good or
service but continue to search for a little more information
VIII. Stages in the Buying Process
a. Buying stages consumers go through
i. Need recognition
ii. Search for product information
iii. Product evaluation
iv. Product choice and purchase
v. Post-purchase use and evaluation of product
1. Post-purchase dissonance:buyers remorse
vi. Disposal of the product
1. Planned obsolescence:deliberate effort by companies to
make their products obsolete, unusable after a period of
time