ajaykumarta-Unit 2 consumer behavior

Editor's Notes

• #12: 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 the right products are always marketed to the right customers in the right way. Consumer behavior is the study of how individuals, groups, and organizations select, buy, use, and dispose of goods, services, ideas, or experiences to satisfy their needs and wants. Marketers must fully understand both the theory and reality of consumer behavior. A consumer’s buying behavior is influenced by cultural, social, and personal factors. Of these, cultural factors exert the broadest and deepest influence.
• #13: Cultural Factors Culture, subculture, and social class are particularly important influences on consumer buying behavior. Culture is the fundamental determinant of a person’s wants and behavior. Through family and other key institutions, a child growing up in the United States is exposed to values such as: achievement and success, activity, efficiency and practicality, progress, material comfort, individualism, freedom, external comfort, humanitarianism, and youthfulness. A child growing up in another country might have a different view of self, relationship to others, and rituals. Marketers must closely attend to cultural values in every country to understand how to best market their existing products and find opportunities for new products.
• #16: Social Factors In addition to cultural factors, social factors such as reference groups, family, and social roles and statuses affect our buying behavior. REFERENCE GROUPS A person’s reference groups are all the groups that have a direct (face-to-face) or indirect influence on their attitudes or behavior. Groups having a direct influence are called membership groups. Some of these are primary groups with whom the person interacts fairly continuously and informally, such as family, friends, neighbors, and coworkers. People also belong to secondary groups, such as religious, professional, and trade-union groups, which tend to be more formal and require less continuous interaction. Reference groups influence members in at least three ways. They expose an individual to new behaviors and lifestyles, they influence attitudes and self-concept, and they create pressures for conformity that may affect product and brand choices. People are also influenced by groups to which they do not belong. Aspirational groups are those a person hopes to join; dissociative groups are those whose values or behavior an individual rejects. FAMILY The family is the most important consumer buying organization in society, and family members constitute the most influential primary reference group. There are two families in the buyer’s life. The family of orientation consists of parents and siblings. From parents a person acquires an orientation toward religion, politics, and economics and a sense of personal ambition, self-worth, and love. Even if the buyer no longer interacts very much with his or her parents, parental influence on behavior can be significant. Almost 40 percent of families have auto insurance with the same company as the husband’s parents. ROLES AND STATUS We each participate in many groups—family, clubs, organizations. Groups often are an important source of information and help to define norms for behavior. We can define a person’s position in each group in terms of role and status. A role consists of the activities a person is expected to perform. Each role in turn connotes a status. A senior vice president of marketing may be seen as having more status than a sales manager, and a sales manager may be seen as having more status than an office clerk. People choose products that reflect and communicate their role and their actual or desired status in society. Marketers must be aware of the status-symbol potential of products and brands.
• #21: Personal Factors Personal characteristics that influence a buyer’s decision include age and stage in the life cycle; occupation and economic circumstances; personality and self-concept; and lifestyle and values. Because many of these have a direct impact on consumer behavior, it is important for marketers to follow them closely. AGE AND STAGE IN THE LIFE CYCLE Our taste in food, clothes, furniture, and recreation is often related to our age. Consumption is also shaped by the family life cycle and the number, age, and gender of people in the household at any point in time. U.S. households are increasingly fragmented—the traditional family of four with a husband, wife, and two kids makes up a much smaller percentage of total households than it once did. The average U.S. household size in 2008 was 2.6 persons. Marketers should also consider critical life events or transitions—marriage, childbirth, illness, relocation, divorce, first job, career change, retirement, death of a spouse—as giving rise to new needs. These should alert service providers—banks, lawyers, and marriage, employment, and bereavement counselors—to ways they can help. PERSONALITY AND SELF-CONCEPT Each person has personality characteristics that influence his or her buying behavior. By personality, we mean a set of distinguishing human psychological traits that lead to relatively consistent and enduring responses to environmental stimuli (including buying behavior).We often describe personality in terms of such traits as self-confidence, dominance, autonomy, deference, sociability, defensiveness, and adaptability. Personality can be a useful variable in analyzing consumer brand choices. Brands also have personalities, and consumers are likely to choose brands whose personalities match their own. We define brand personality as the specific mix of human traits that we can attribute to a particular brand.
• #22: OCCUPATION AND ECONOMIC CIRCUMSTANCES Occupation also influences consumption patterns. Marketers try to identify the occupational groups that have above-average interest in their products and services and even tailor products for certain occupational groups: Computer software companies, for example, design different products for brand managers, engineers, lawyers, and physicians. As the recent recession clearly indicated, both product and brand choice are greatly affected by economic circumstances: spendable income (level, stability, and time pattern), savings and assets (including the percentage that is liquid), debts, borrowing power, and attitudes toward spending and saving. Luxury-goods makers such as Gucci, Prada, and Burberry are vulnerable to an economic downturn. If economic indicators point to a recession, marketers can take steps to redesign, reposition, and reprice their products or introduce or increase the emphasis on discount brands so they can continue to offer value to target customers. LIFESTYLE AND VALUES People from the same subculture, social class, and occupation may lead quite different lifestyles. A lifestyle is a person’s pattern of living in the world as expressed in activities, interests, and opinions. It portrays the “whole person” interacting with his or her environment. Marketers search for relationships between their products and lifestyle groups. A computer manufacturer might find that most computer buyers are achievement-oriented and then aim the brand more clearly at the achiever lifestyle. Lifestyles are shaped partly by whether consumers are money constrained or time constrained. Companies aiming to serve money-constrained consumers will create lower -cost products and services. By appealing to thrifty consumers, Walmart has become the largest company in the world. Its “everyday low prices” have wrung tens of billions of dollars out of the retail supply chain, passing the larger part of savings along to shoppers in the form of rock-bottom bargain prices. Consumers who experience time famine are prone to multitasking, doing two or more things at the same time. They will also pay others to perform tasks because time is more important to them than money. Companies aiming to serve them will create convenient products and services for this group.
• #25: Freud – Psychological forces that shaped peoples behavior are unconscious. Maslow – People are driven by different needs at different times. According to Maslow, human needs are arranged in a hierarchy from most to least pressing. Herzberg – Developed two-factor theory that distinguishes dissatisfiers (factors that cause dissatisfaction) from satisfiers (factors that cause satisfaction).
• #28: Selective retention – People tend to remember (forget) information that supports (differs) our attitudes and beliefs. A motivated person is ready to act—how is influenced by his or her perception of the situation. In marketing, perceptions are more important than reality, because perceptions affect consumers’ actual behavior. Perception is the process by which we select, organize, and interpret information inputs to create a meaningful picture of the world. It depends not only on physical stimuli, but also on the stimuli’s relationship to the surrounding environment and on conditions within each of us. One person might perceive a fast-talking salesperson as aggressive and insincere; another, as intelligent and helpful. Each will respond to the salesperson differently. SELECTIVE ATTENTION Attention is the allocation of processing capacity to some stimulus. Voluntary attention is something purposeful; involuntary attention is grabbed by someone or something. It’s estimated that the average person may be exposed to over 1,500 ads or brand communications a day. Because we cannot possibly attend to all these, we screen most stimuli out—a process called selective attention. Selective attention means that marketers must work hard to attract consumers’ notice. SELECTIVE DISTORTION Even noticed stimuli don’t always come across in the way the senders intended. Selective distortion is the tendency to interpret information in a way that fits our preconceptions. Consumers will often distort information to be consistent with prior brand and product beliefs and expectations. For a stark demonstration of the power of consumer brand beliefs, consider that in “blind” taste tests, one group of consumers samples a product without knowing which brand it is, while another group knows. Invariably, the groups have different opinions, despite consuming exactly the same product. SELECTIVE RETENTION Most of us don’t remember much of the information to which we’re exposed, but we do retain information that supports our attitudes and beliefs. Because of selective retention, we’re likely to remember good points about a product we like and forget good points about competing products. Selective retention again works to the advantage of strong brands. It also explains why marketers need to use repetition—to make sure their message is not overlooked. SUBLIMINAL PERCEPTION The selective perception mechanisms require consumers’ active engagement and thought. A topic that has fascinated armchair marketers for ages is subliminal perception. They argue that marketers embed covert, subliminal messages in ads or packaging. Consumers are not consciously aware of them, yet they affect behavior. Although it’s clear that mental processes include many subtle subconscious effects, no evidence supports the notion that marketers can systematically control consumers at that level, especially enough to change moderately important or strongly held beliefs.
• #29: When we act, we learn. Learning induces changes in our behavior arising from experience. Most human behavior is learned, although much learning is incidental. Learning theorists believe learning is produced through the interplay of drives, stimuli, cues, responses, and reinforcement. Two popular approaches to learning are classical conditioning and operant (instrumental) conditioning. A drive is a strong internal stimulus impelling action. Cues are minor stimuli that determine when, where, and how a person responds. Suppose you buy an HP computer. If your experience is rewarding, your response to computers and HP will be positively reinforced. Later, when you want to buy a printer, you may assume that because it makes good computers, HP also makes good printers. In other words, you generalize your response to similar stimuli. A countertendency to generalization is discrimination. Discrimination means we have learned to recognize differences in sets of similar stimuli and can adjust our responses accordingly.
• #32: Brand associations consist of all brand related thoughts, feelings, perceptions, images, experiences, beliefs, attitudes, and so on that become linked to the brand node in the brain.
• #34: Consumers don’t always pass through all five stages—they may skip or reverse some. When you buy your regular brand of toothpaste, you go directly from the need to the purchase decision, skipping information search and evaluation. The model in Figure 6.4 provides a good frame of reference, however, because it captures the full range of considerations that arise when a consumer faces a highly involving new purchase
• #35: Smart companies try to fully understand customers’ buying decision process—all the experiences in learning, choosing, using, and even disposing of a product. Marketing scholars have developed a “stage model” of the process. The consumer typically passes through five stages: problem recognition, information search, evaluation of alternatives, purchase decision, and postpurchase behavior. Clearly, the buying process starts long before the actual purchase and has consequences long afterward.
• #36: An internal stimulus is triggered by a person’s normal needs – hunger, thirst – when the need rises to a threshold level. A need can also be aroused by an external stimulus, such as seeing a commercial for a vacation. A person then begins to consider the possibility of taking a vacation.
• #37: Information Search Surprisingly, consumers often search for limited amounts of information. Surveys have shown that for durables, half of all consumers look at only one store, and only 30 percent look at more than one brand of appliances. We can distinguish between two levels of engagement in the search. The milder search state is called heightened attention. At this level a person simply becomes more receptive to information about a product. At the next level, the person may enter an active information search: looking for reading material, phoning friends, going online, and visiting stores to learn about the product.
• #38: By gathering information, the consumer learns about competing brands and their features. The first box in Figure 6.5 shows the total set of brands available. The individual consumer will come to know a subset of these, the awareness set. Only some, the consideration set, will meet initial buying criteria. As the consumer gathers more information, just a few, the choice set, will remain strong contenders. The consumer makes a final choice from these.
• #39: No single process is used by all consumers, or by one consumer in all buying situations. It is important that marketers understand that: The consumer is trying to satisfy a need. The consumer is looking for certain benefits from the product solution. The consumer sees each product as a bundle of attributes with varying abilities to deliver the benefits. -- The attributes of interest will vary based on the product. A belief is a descriptive thought that a person holds about something. Attitudes are a person’s enduring favorable, or unfavorable evaluations, emotional feelings, and action tendencies toward some object or idea.
• #40: The consumer arrives at attitudes toward various brands through an attribute evaluation procedure, developing a set of beliefs about where each brand stands on each attribute. The expectancy-value model of attitude formation posits that consumers evaluate products and services by combining their brand beliefs—the positives and negatives—according to importance.
• #41: After a consumer has reached a purchase intention, up to five subdecisions may need to be made. The brand, the dealer (where), quantity, timing (when), and payment method. With noncompensatory models of consumer choice, positive and negative attribute considerations don’t necessarily net out. Evaluating attributes in isolation makes decision making easier for a consumer, but it also increases the likelihood that she would have made a different choice if she had deliberated in greater detail. We highlight three choice heuristics here. 1. Using the conjunctive heuristic, the consumer sets a minimum acceptable cutoff level for each attribute and chooses the first alternative that meets the minimum standard for all attributes. For example, if Linda decided all attributes had to rate at least 5, she would choose laptop computer B. 2. With the lexicographic heuristic, the consumer chooses the best brand on the basis of its perceived most important attribute. With this decision rule, Linda would choose laptop computer C. 3. Using the elimination-by-aspects heuristic, the consumer compares brands on an attribute selected probabilistically—where the probability of choosing an attribute is positively related to its importance—and eliminates brands that do not meet minimum acceptable cutoffs.
• #42: After the purchase, the consumer might experience dissonance from noticing certain disquieting features or hearing favorable things about other brands and will be alert to information that supports his or her decision. Marketing communications should supply beliefs and evaluations that reinforce the consumer’s choice and help him or her feel good about the brand. The marketer’s job therefore doesn’t end with the purchase. Marketers must monitor postpurchase satisfaction, postpurchase actions, and postpurchase product uses and disposal. POSTPURCHASE SATISFACTION Satisfaction is a function of the closeness between expectations and the product’s perceived performance. If performance falls short of expectations, the consumer is disappointed; if it meets expectations, the consumer is satisfied; if it exceeds expectations, the consumer is delighted. These feelings make a difference in whether the customer buys the product again and talks favorably or unfavorably about it to others. The larger the gap between expectations and performance, the greater the dissatisfaction. Here the consumer’s coping style comes into play. Some consumers magnify the gap when the product isn’t perfect and are highly dissatisfied; others minimize it and are less dissatisfied. POSTPURCHASE ACTIONS A satisfied consumer is more likely to purchase the product again and will also tend to say good things about the brand to others. Dissatisfied consumers may abandon or return the product. They may seek information that confirms its high value. They may take public action by complaining to the company, going to a lawyer, or complaining to other groups (such as business, private, or government agencies). Private actions include deciding to stop buying the product (exit option) or warning friends (voice option).
• #43: Marketers should also monitor how buyers use and dispose of the product ( Figure 6.7). A key driver of sales frequency is product consumption rate—the more quickly buyers consume a product, the sooner they may be back in the market to repurchase it. Consumers may fail to replace some products soon enough because they overestimate product life. One strategy to speed replacement is to tie the act of replacing the product to a certain holiday, event, or time of year.
• #44: The manner or path by which a consumer moves through the decision-making stages depends on several factors, including the level of involvement and extent of variety seeking, as follows. LOW-INVOLVEMENT CONSUMER DECISION MAKING The expectancy-value model assumes a high level of consumer involvement, or engagement and active processing the consumer undertakes in responding to a marketing stimulus. VARIETY-SEEKING BUYING BEHAVIOR Some buying situations are characterized by low involvement but significant brand differences. Here consumers often do a lot of brand switching. Think about cookies. The consumer has some beliefs about cookies, chooses a brand without much evaluation, and evaluates the product during consumption. Next time, the consumer may reach for another brand out of a desire for a different taste. Brand switching occurs for the sake of variety, rather than dissatisfaction.
• #48: Managers use market research to help them better understand the customers and markets. These insights are the how’s and why’s certain things happen in the market. The text gives an example of how Gillette conducted market research on the woman’s shaver market and how this research led the company to develop the Venus razor, which now has more than 50% of the global market.
• #53: Marketers must not focus too broadly or too narrowly on the research question.
• #62: Most expensive step Most prone to errors
• #70: Develop summary measures Compute averages Statistical analysis / decision models
• #72: Transform raw data into insight Present information in clear and compelling fashion
• #75: Research should guide decisions, not be used to support decisions already made.
• #79: Marketers are in position to collect information from customers, competitors, and other external factors/group that can help to identify market changes.
• #80: A marketing information system consists of people, equipment, and procedures to gather, sort, analyze, evaluate, and distribute information that is needed, timely and accurate.
• #81: A marketing information system consists of people, equipment, and procedures to gather, sort, analyze, evaluate, and distribute information that is needed, timely and accurate.
• #82: The order-to-payment cycle entails the process that orders go through once they are received by the company. Includes invoices and shipping documents. Customers prefer firms that can get orders processed quickly and accurately. Sales information systems provide managers with up-to-date information on the current sales of individual products. Databases store and organize information that can be retrieved based on a number of criteria such as purchase history, product preferences, and can even contain demographic and psychographic information on customers.
• #83: A marketing intelligence system is a set of procedures and sources that managers use to obtain everyday information about developments in the marketing environment. This information can come from reading books and trade journals; talking to customers, distributors, suppliers, etc; monitoring social media; and talking to other managers in the company.
• #84: Companies can improve marketing intelligence through the methods listed on the slide as well as through channel members, government data sources, and the purchase of information through secondary data sources.
• #85: Epinions.com, Bizrate.com, or ConsumerReview.com
• #86: Marketing intelligence should be gathered and shared with decision makers quickly in order to effectively use the information.
• #87: Where the microenvironment refers to those elements closest to the company, customers, competitors, suppliers, etc., the macroenvrionment refers to those elements that can impact a company, but cannot be controlled. These include things such as the economy, culture, demographics, politics, technology, and the natural environment.
• #90: Fad – Hula Hoop; Trend – Diet/exercise; Megatrend – Electric automobiles FAD: Unpredictable, short-lived, and without social, economic, and political significance. Fads are measured in months, rather than years. Wham-0 sold 25 million Hula Hoops in its first 4 months. Pet rocks were launched in the mid-1970’s and sold 1 million units in a matter of months. Five month’s later sales were almost non-existent. TRENDS: Offer a view of the future due to their momentum and durability. The fitness/diet trend is an example, although there have been many fads within this trend, the overall movement toward healthier living has remained. MEGATRENDS: Changes that are slow to form but once established last for 7 – 10 years (or more). Megatrends influence all factors of life that impact business, culture, economics, society, and personal lives.
• #91: Market-test