Consumer’s Behaviour In Marketing

CONSUMER’S BEHAVIOUR IN MARKETING The buyer is the central focus of the marketing effort. An important part of the marketing process is to understand why a customer or buyer makes a purchase. Viewing marketing from the buyer’s perspective involves looking at the internal and external factors that influence purchase behaviour. Without such an understanding, businesses find it hard to respond to the customer’s needs and wants. Behavioural scientists’ actions focus on describing, understanding and predicting buyer’s behaviour. In this way they can better match their activities to meet the wants and needs of their target markets. Buyers can be divided into two broad categories: consumers and organizations. Consumer buyers are those who purchase items for their personal consumption and industrial buyers are those who purchase items on behalf of their business or organization. Both types of buyers follow a similar decision process for finding the products or services most appropriate to their needs. Whether in organizational or consumer buying situations, people play different roles and participate at different stages in the buying decision process. Some may act as initiators or requester for goods and services. Others may occupy the role of influencers and attempt to have the decider (the person with the authority and responsibility for making the purchase decision) select the product, brand or store which they favour. The person who actually makes the purchase is the buyer. Those who consume the product are the users, and those who judge whether the product’s consumption satisfies the needs are the evaluators. As a single consumer, someone may occupy all of these roles or may play only one or some of these roles, for other purchase situations – family, job, club, etc. In this work paper the attention is directed towards consumers and those factors that influence consumer’s behaviour. Factors influencing consumer purchase behaviour The factors affecting consumer behaviour are discussed from the perspective of •

Internal influences,

•

Environmental influences (external influences)

•

Marketer –initiated influences

1. Internal influences – not directly observable - are those factors which are internalized to the consumer and affect the consumer’s selection of products. They are: motivations, perceptions, learning, attitudes, personality and lifestyle. These factors are related to one another. For example, to some extent, our level of motivation and our specific motives have an effect on those stimuli we perceive in our environment and on how we perceive them. Information gathered through these perceptions enables us to learn about our environment and the specific products and brands in our environment. Learning is essential for the development of attitudes. Motives - the initial stage of the consumer decision process represent the recognition of a need or problem. According to A. Maslow, needs are arranged in the following hierarchy: 1. Psychological needs (nutritional necessities, sleep, sensory pleasure, maternal behaviour,

activity and exercise); 2. Safety needs (security, stability, dependency, protection, freedom, need for laws); 3. Belongingness and love needs (to give and receive love and affection, to develop

relationships); 4. Esteem needs; 5. Self-actualization needs (self-fulfilment, self – development).

Unless a certain level of needs has been satisfied, higher levels of needs will not serve to motivate the individual. Thus, once a level of needs has been satisfied, it no longer serves as a motivator. The amount of unsatisfied needs influences the effort that the individual will expend in seeking need gratification. The object of the individual’s behaviour is determined also by its ability to satisfy the particular motivating need. Perceptions. Marketers are concerned with the way consumers perceive their product offers. Consumers are faced with an increasingly complex environment which bombards them with thousands of stimuli every day. Perception is the process by which the sensory stimuli are selected, organized and given meaning. For example our perception of “quality” may be based on known standards of performance. When there are no objective standards, our perception of quality may be based on subjective factors such as brand name, the store in which the product is stocked, an advertising slogan or price. Learning may be defined as a change in the response tendency of an individual because of the effect of experience with the environment. Consumers learn to respond in a particular way by studying the consequences of their purchase behaviour. For example, people continue to

purchase a particular brand if they are satisfied with that brand. The most significant outcome of a consumer’s use of a product is satisfaction with the product.

Some marketers consider

repetitive advertising as an important tool for establishing associations between product symbols (packing, logos) and brand names, thus creating familiarity with the product among customers. These familiar brands are much more likely to be considered by customers than brands they have not heard of before. Concerning brand loyalty (the greater probability that a consumer will purchase a certain brand repeatedly) the consumer even may be aware that other brands might offer greater satisfaction, yet is not interested in those brands. The brand currently being purchased may provide enough satisfaction and not exploring new brands reduces the consumer’s risk of unknown consequences. But recent research found out that brand-loyal consumers have been declining. The erosion of brand loyalty and the growth of non-brand products determine challenges for firms that invested much in building brand names. Attitudes. Marketers’ concern is to understand how attitudes toward brands are formed, maintained and changed since they are important determinants of consumer’s behavior. Consumers favour products and brands for which they have positive attitudes and avoid those for which they have negative attitudes. For example, consumers who agree that some nutrients are healthy will have a positive attitude for products containing them. But on contrary, consumers who believe that caffeine is harmful have the tendency to avoid cola products. Attitudes toward products and brands are also shaped by family and peer groups. Consumers hold beliefs about the attributes of a particular brand or about the benefits which it provides. For example, a woman believes that Pantene Shampoo has a nice smell, rinses out easily (are attributes) and makes her hair shiny and attractive (benefits). Consumers make an overall evaluation of a brand on the basis of their beliefs about its attributes or benefits. When consumers have favourable evaluations of brands they tend to purchase. When the evaluations are unfavourable they tend not to purchase. Generally, the consumer looks at only one or a few attributes of a product. The marketer’s task is to identify the relevant product attributes and their benefits, communicate them to the consumer and provide an opportunity for their easy in –store evaluation. For example, in a supermarket, consumers who want to purchase a new product that they have not used before, they pick the product on the shelf and examine it (read the label, smell it).

Personality refers to the way a person acts which makes that person different from others. This is a fundamental aspect of human behaviour which influences purchase behaviour. People are very different and their personalities influence the purchasing process but marketing researches faced difficulty in trying to use personality to explain specific consumer purchases. Therefore, marketers have turned to lifestyle research. Lifestyle represents a broad composite of what a person does, the way the lives, what products and services are bought and how they are used. Lifestyle is in fact what the individual does with available resources – financial, social and time. This dimension influences consumer behaviour. According to their lifestyles people purchase different products and services, from different places or stores, at different periods. Considering foodstuffs purchasing, there are people who go shopping many times a week, once a week, twice a month and so on according to their time, money and needs. There are people who prefer spending a large amount of money for a larger quantity of foodstuffs at a time but others cannot afford it and buy smaller quantities of products more often. Some people prefer an expensive one - week vacation to a cheaper fortnight vacation. 2. Environmental influences refer to economic factors, cultural factors, social class, reference groups and random environmental factors. Economic factors. It is obvious that consumers cannot spend more money than they have or use more credit than is available to them. The consumer’s available income is an important influencer of behaviour because it can limit total expenditures, eliminate alternatives, change expectations of product attainments and influence the amount of time devoted to gathering information on the alternatives. The cost of living is another influencer because if it rises at a rate less than the rate of personal income, consumers either will have a real increase in income and will spend their money for more goods and services or will increase their savings. Otherwise, if income increases do not keep pace with rises in the cost of living, real income declines and consumers find that their paychecks do not buy the same amount of goods and services as before. To compensate for this decline in real income, they will seek less expensive items or retail outlets with fewer services but lower mark-ups. Cultural factors. Culture is the broadest of the external social influences on consumer’s behaviour. Values are learned through the process of consumer socialization in which younger members of society develop attitudes toward products, brands and the purchasing process.

Social learning is the result of social influences on consumer behaviour. For example, a child is taught to buy or how to shop for bargains or a child may imitate the consumption patterns of family members and peers. Marketing abroad requires particular attention to cultural differences. Many companies, when they begin to market abroad, make serious errors because they are unaware of the subtle differences in local cultural values. As concerns subcultures, orthodox people, Mormons, or other religion-based subcultures have rules which include what their members can and cannot consume. When subcultures contain enough people, they can be considered as market segments justifying separate marketing strategies. Hispanics represent the main important subculture in the United States. Their attitudes toward brands are often distinct. Thus companies such as McDonald’s, Coca –Cola advertise in Spanish language. Social class. Moreover, people do not live with uniformly equal status. Every society is stratified into different levels of social status which give rise to many of our social motivations. Sometimes people attempt to climb the social ladder purchasing certain products (the tendency to buy certain brands of cars considered conventionally the best ones). Reference group is any aggregation of people who influence an individual’s attitudes or behaviour. Someone will buy Nike trainers because a famous sportsman wears that brand. Family is considered to have the greatest influence on purchase behaviour. Besides adult roles, parents set examples of adult consumers. But parents may be influenced by their children. The child can request a certain brand of cereal, chocolate or toy seen on TV. Family buying patterns vary according to the type of products being purchased. For example, the husband has the dominant influence in purchasing the car and different types of insurance but the wife has the dominant influence in purchasing cleaning products, food, and clothing. From changes in family composition, a study has drawn the following implications for marketers: Declining family size affects marketers who sell products that appeal to large families (large package sizes of products). The young divorced stage may be a good segment for small appliances, personal services (health spas and sports clubs) Middle–aged childless couples and divorced individuals with no children to support may represent a good market for luxury goods and services. Middle – aged divorce parents may seek low-priced products.

Random environmental factors also can shape consumer’s behaviour. Weather, for example, determines the demand for specific products. Hot weather areas increase the demand for air-conditioners and cooling beverages. Also, epidemics or a disease may request purchasing specific medications. A government announcement can affect consumer’s attitudes and purchase behaviour. A disease largely spread among animals may cause a drop in demand for meat or related products. International situations can influence consumer’s behaviour. The oil crisis affected the way consumers evaluated automobiles. Changing technology is constantly influencing consumer’s behaviour. Video projectors replaced other projection equipment. 3. Market-initiated influences. Buyer behaviour influences which are controllable by the marketer’s own organisation are of major interest. In formulating the marketing programme of a firm, the marketing decision-maker should view the different components (product, price, distribution, personal selling, and advertising) as an integrated package, which the consumer will perceive as a single offering. Marketing elements are seen by the consumer as only part of the total purchase environment. A price can be high or low relative to the consumer’s income, need for quality and perceived quality of the brand. Consumer’s behaviour concerns the study of the following questions: what, when, how, where and why people do or do not buy products. It attempts to understand the consumer decision making process, both individually and in groups. It studies characteristics of individual consumers and behavioural variables in an attempt to understand people's needs and wants and also tries to assess influences on the consumer from groups such as family, friends, reference groups, and society in general. Consumer’s behaviour is a complex process comprising all the activities people engage in when they search for, select, purchase, use, evaluate and dispose products and services in order to satisfy their needs and desires.